December 18, 2005
M to Q - Compendium of Communist Biography by surname
Communist biographies, surnames M to P follow: 105 biographies @ January 2007.
The following entries appear below:
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, Len Nash, Sid Nash, Reg Neal, Marjorie Negrea, John Walton Newbold, Peter Nicholas, T E Nicholas, Jock Nicolson, Melita Norwood, Sean O’Casey, Joe O’Connor, L P O’Connor, Paddy O’Daire, Effie O’Hare, Elsie Oliver, Jimmy Ord, Michael O’Riordan, Wilf Page, Bernard Panter, Bert Papworth, Jack Pascoe, Billy Paterson, Frank Paterson, Eric Park, John Park, Willie Paul, Will Paynter, Bert Pearce, Mike Perkins, 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, Harold Quinton
Ewan MacColl
Ewan McColl, as posterity only remembers him, was born in 1915 in Salford as James Miller. His father, Bill Miller, was an iron foundry worker, both parent hailed originally from Scotland. His father joined the Communist Party and his mother, Betsy Hendry, was also an active left-winger. The songs his family brought from Scotland were an especially formative experience for the young Jimmy.
A week after his fourteenth birthday, he left school, after two months he got a job in a wire factory but was made redundant in less than a year. Like many he was unemployed for periods and also worked in many jobs in factories and one building sites. In the spring of 1928, Charlie Harrison became a lodger with the Millers, a waterproofing worker by trade he was also secretary of the dozen members of the local Party branch. He played gramophone records on Sunday mornings, some so worn that the music came out oddly. Young Jimmy imitated them for his cousin and was overheard by Harrison. He suggested that Jimmy joining the Manchester Clarion Players.
He did indeed take part in the rehearsals of the Clarion Players but, after a while, a sense that they were not leading anywhere came to him. Charlie Harrison, suggested that he might be interested in attending a meeting of the Young Communist League and, after a few days, he introduced Jimmy to members of the Manchester branch of the YCL; as Jimmy later put it: “It was a step which was to influence my whole life”. The most obvious change was that he began to read voraciously and widely. He also joined the Manchester and Salford Workers Film Society. By 1929, he was heavily involved in the Workers' Arts Club, a three-storey building with a top floor as a boxing gym and a good source of recruitment to the YCL. The middle floor was kept for meetings, dances or socials.
He was now also active in the youth council of the National Unemployed Workers Movement, when he began his musical career as a street-singer and sketch player. He was one of seven unemployed youths aged 15 to 17 years, who decided to form the Red Megaphones, a street-performing group and was intensively involved generally in politics. The group’s audiences were largely drawn from the ranks those organised in the National Unemployed Workers' Movement at meetings, demonstrations and hunger-marches. Jimmy’s main output at this time was songs for hunger marchers, which were parodies of popular songs, composed virtually spontaneously as fully formed. But he went on to write for, or later edit, nine different factory newspapers, mostly satirical verse. He even composed advertising jingles for restaurants.
He took part in the hunger marches but he started doing occasional radio work in 1933, after being approached by the BBC’s North Regional Programme Director, to read some verses in a feature programme about May Day. He provided the “working-class voice”, a role he continued with for several years. In the same way that he had drifted quite accidentally into radio acting, he now meandered into scriptwriting and occasional feature production for the medium. He was involved in a range of radio-related work from 1933 until 1938; in 1933, he had an acting role in a programme about May Day, the following year he was involved in one about the songs of Robert Burns. By 1936, he was scripting a radio show with historico-political themes, then a piece about seafarers; in 1938, a feature with regionally-voiced actors across the country celebrating the centenary of the Chartists. From 1948 onwards, his radio work concentrated on folk song collecting and themes associated with indigenous music.
But radio did not by any means occupy all of Jimmy Miller’s talents and energy. Pursuing his interest in theatre, in 1934, he had teamed up with Joan Littlewood, a RADA trained actress, with him doing a little acting but mostly writing scripts. They married and set up the Theatre of Action. The following year, they decamped to London and formed a drama school that was to lead to Littlewood’s later and famous Theatre Workshop. In 1936, now in north-east England, they formed Theatre Union, which had a great impact. In 1939, one performance led to them being barred from taking part in any kind of theatrical activity for the next two years, due to a `breach of the peace’.
With the war, this venture ended but they carried out drama training by correspondence. In August 1945, Theatre Workshop was launched and performed successfully until 1952, with many of the plays being written by Miller. George Bernard once said that (other than himself!) he was the best living playwright in Britain. He became disenchanted with the move to London and his relationship and eventually marriage to Littlewood ended. By this time, Jimmy Miller had also changed his name to Ewan MacColl, which he was known as for the rest of his life. In 1950, he married the dancer Jean Newlove, by whom he had two children, Hamish and Kirsty, both of whom became singers and musicians, the latter rather famously.
MacColl now played a key role in building the folk revival, recognising the importance of the folk club and placing the music firmly in the camp of the Left. They contributed to song books published by the Workers' Music Association, the Young Communist League and the CND. In London, MacColl founded (with Bert Lloyd – see entry - and others) the famed Singers Club, which functioned from 1953 until as late as 1991. In 1956, his life long personal and musical partnership with Peggy Seeger began and they were to have three children, all of whom became musicians. They formed Blackthorne, their own record company, issuing much of their own work as well as others in the same tradition.
As we have seen, from the early 1930s, MacColl had been involved in radio, so it was not a big leap to begin collaborating from 1957 until 1964 with Peggy Seeger and Charles Parker on a series of musical documentaries, the famed radio-ballads.
In 1965, MacColl and Seeger founded the Critics Group, with a view to forming a base from which a folk theatre could be developed. They published books of their own songs and various small collections, including two anthologies of travellers' songs. MacColl is best known as the writer of the songs "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," "Dirty Old Town," "The Shoals of Herring," "Freeborn Man" and "The Manchester Rambler" but he wrote more than three hundred songs. He wrote Manchester Rambler when he was 17 after the 1932 Mass Trespass on Kinder Scout. "Dirty Old Town" was written in 1949 to cover an awkward scene change in "Landscape with Chimneys". Peggy Seeger has assembled 200 of these into “The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook”.
In 1979, he suffered the first of many heart attacks but he continued to work, tour, lecture and write songs. In 1980, he wrote his last play, and in 1987 began to write his autobiography. On October 22 1989, he died of complications following a heart operation, aged 74.
In 1985 a Seventieth Birthday Concert was organised in celebration of his life; this was also a benefit for the National Union of Mineworkers, still then engaged in its major strike against pit closures. McColl and Seeger themselves produced a radio ballad style recording about the strike.
Source: The Working Class Movement Library has created a wonderfully informative webpage about Ewan McColl, from which much of the information for this entry has been taken; my thanks and acknowledgements to WCML.
G. MacCullough
A railwayman from Lillie Bridge, West Brompton who, during World War Two, as a shop steward, organised 100% trade unionism in his depot and a higher output of tanks.
MacCullough was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his heroism in the blitz on London, when he rescued people trapped at Sloane Square underground station after it was totally destroyed by German bombers at 10pm on the 12th November 1940. A large concrete fragment landed on roof of a carriage of a departing train, injuring 79 people. MacCullough cut through girders with an oxy-acetylene torch at great personal risk to secure the rescue.
He had joined the Communist Party during the war and he was used as
an example of the exemplary workers joining the Party in its publicity.
Michael Walker
Source: `We Are Many’ by Ted Bramley
Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Grieve)
Hugh MacDiarmid was the pen-name of the poet Christopher Murray Grieve and the name by which he is generally remembered. A declared Communist continously from the late 1920s, he was actually a member of the Party `only’ from 1934-38 and 1957-78. As MacDiarmid, he led a Scottish literary revival, aiming to engender cultural self-confidence amongst Scots as apolitical weapon. He adopted the use of a form of Scottish dialect, ‘Lallans’, which was a borrowing from many different way Scots spoke at different times and in different places but his poetry was thoroughly modernistic in form.
Born on 11th August 1892 in Dumfriesshire, he was influenced towards radicalism by his postman father and towards literature by virtue of the family’s residence in the local, where his mother was the caretaker. After the death of his father in 1911, Christopher Grieve turned to journalism. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1915 to 1920 and then returned to journalism as the editor of the Montrose Review.
Over the next few years he began to write and publish books and poetry, to the extent that he began to become seriously noted. Although he also wrote poetry in English, much of his best work is written in Lallans. `A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ (1926) is an epic critique of imposed `Scottish’ culture, with its `twee' pretensions contrasted to the reality of social deprivation. MacDiarmid’s objection was against a subtle yet powerful form of cultural imperialism and inevitably he opted for a political route to express this, becoming attracted to Communism but imposing on it his own very Scottish gloss.
He was a founding member of the Scottish National Party in 1928, but was expelled in 1933 for his committed communism, already expressed openly in the first of his `Hymns to Lenin’, which appeared in 1931 and was greatrly influential upon up-and-coming poets and sometime Communist such as Stephen Spender and others. Yet MacDiarmid found himself also expelled from the Communist Party after four years. Needless to say, MacDiarmid was a cantankerous personality, as well as a gifted one!
MacDiarmid was first noted in MI5 files in 1931, when his name was mentioned by a group of Communist journalists meeting in a social setting at a Fleet Street pub and reported by an informant. Soon after, an MI5 informant reported a speech by MacDiarmid in which he said Scotland "did not end at the Cheviots but that Lancashire was its rightful boundary". Quite how the reportage of juicy items such as this helped the British Empire remains quite elusive!
He formally joined the Communist Party in London in the summer of 1934 but increasingly found himself at odds with the Party’s leadership, since he was drawn to John MacLean's earlier position of an independent Scottish Workers Republic. His poem, 'John MacLean (1879-1923)' had been first published in September 1933. By the time MacDiarmid came to write 'Red Scotland' in April 1935, he was in full agreement with MacLean.
He was taken to task by the supremely honest Peter Kerrigan, a man of enormous integrity but a firm disciplinarian. In the Daily Worker of 25th November 1935, Kerrigan differed with MacDiarmid’s opinion that an imperialist war could lay the basis for a separate Scottish revolution. He also called on MacDiarmid to dissociate from the `social credit’ economic and taxation redistribution theories of Major C H Douglas with which he was enamoured.
In June 1936 the Scottish Party’s Secretariat began a correspondence of more than twenty letters to MacDiarmid over the next three years. But he persistently avoided meeting the leadership of these issues. (His residence in the Shetlands (from 1933 to 1942) hardly assisted in this.) MacDiarmid’s four-page pamphlet, `Scotland; and the Question of a Popular Front Against Fascism and War’, argued publicly for an independent Scotland. The sentences that the Communist Party took most exception to led to his expulsion: “The betrayal of John MacLean's line by the Communist Party of Great Britain has resulted in a loss to Scottish Socialism beyond all reckoning. Even William Gallagher, MP, who was primarily responsible for it, admits this in his autobiography, Revolt on the Clyde.'
MacDiarmid was expelled by the unanimous decision of the Scottish District Committee and informed by letter in November 1936. In March 1937, he appealed against his expulsion and received a conciliatory reply from the party centre in London. MacDiarmid was re-admitted to the party by the Appeals Commission during the Congress in May. In return for re-admission he was asked to submit the manuscript of any book that might touch on Party policy to the District leadership for consideration. But, in June 1938, the first issue of his `The Voice of Scotland’ appeared, MacDiarmid had, by this act, made it clear that nothing that he wrote would be subject to Communist Party discipline.
MacDiarmid contuned to produce significant literary work and, almost two decades later, on 20 February 1957 he was informed by Gordon McLennan, then Scottish Secretary, that the Scottish Committee of the Party had decided unanimously to support his re-admission, he accepted and remained a member until his death, even standing in a parliamentary election for the Party.
Nothing about MacDiarmid was ever muted and the background to his becoming a Communist parliamentary candidate was no exception! This position arose out of the election to the Tory Party leadership of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, at a time when the Conservative Party held a majority in Parliament and formed the government. He had been a peer and was required to resign from the Lords and stand in a by-election in November 1963 so as to obtain a Commons seat from which to become Prime Minister. The then exceedingly Tory constituency of Kinross and West Perthshire was vacated for him.
Hugh MacDiarmid, contemplating his own image
Christopher Grieve was outraged not only at the deference and adherence to archaic ways that all this implied. He was driven especially by the supine attitude of the BBC towards Douglas-Home’s `emergence’ as Tory leader and his effective `coronation’ as Prime Minister – in a Scottish seat at that - to seek legal redress.
In a celebrated case (Grieve v Douglas-Home), he challenged the election, seeking it declared void by virtue of a breach of Section 63 of the Representation of the People Act, in that due balance had not been given to all candidates in the by-election. The long-term result was the care that broadcasters make to at least mention the names of all candidates in all elections covered by them.
Home went on to lead the Tory Party in the subsequent general election but his image, not aided by Grieve’s challenge, was a factor in the defeat of the Tories and the forming of a Labour government by Harold Wilson, who milked the evident disenchantment with the old school tie image of the Tories for all it was worth. Home was replaced in the first ever formal election of Tory by Ted Heath. MacDiarmid, as Christopeher Grieve, stood in the Kinross seat in that general election as a Communist Party candidate, a hopeless but endearingly brave endeavour.
In all, MacDiarmid published over thirty books and his collected works run to 1,500 pages He live in Biggar from 1951 until his death on September 9th 1978; he was buried in Langholm, where a memorial sculpture now stands.
Sources:BBC Scotland; National Archives; John Manson `Cencrastus’ CHNN, No 12 Spring 2002;http://www.slainte.org.uk
Malcolm MacEwan
MacEwan, who was born on December 24th 1911, came from an affluent Highland family in Scotland and was sent to Rosall, an English `public’ school, so that he would loose his local accent.
At Aberdeen University he studied forestry. He met novelist Neil Gunn, who convinced him over self-government for Scotland. At the age of 21, MacEwan lost his leg in a motorcycle accident. After spending months in an Inverness nursing home, he became an inveterate reader. A degree in law from Edinburgh followed as did membership of the Communist Party. He first joined those producing the Scottish edition of the Daily Worker in the pre-war period and this led to 13 years in London as the paper’s foreign editor and parliamentary correspondent. He became associated with the New Reasoner trend in the Party that pioneered a revisionist approach to Marxism, engaging in openly factional activity.
His subsequent expulsion from the Communist Party resulted in his following a course that echoed his youth and led to ecological politics for the rest of his life. He edited the journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, became a member of the Exmoor National Park Committee and pioneered a green approach to landscape conservation. He produced his memoirs, `The Greening of a Red’ in 1991 and died on May 11th 1996, aged 84.
Guardian May 15th 1996
J D Mack
J D Mack was a leading member of the early Communist Party in Leeds. A member of the Labour Party, he led a group of Communists in the Central division of Leeds Labour Party, which included S Richardson, C Crowther and S Boffman. Their primary work within the Labour Party increasingly came to be to oppose the ban on Communists holding office or being members of the Labour Party imposed by the national Labour Party, starting with Edinburgh Labour Party conference amendments in 1923.
Through Mack’s efforts, the left only narrowly lost a resolution at their Constituency Labour Party, stating that the Edinburgh amendments were “Contrary to the unity of the Working Class Movement”, being defeated by 46 votes to 40. Leeds City Labour Party also opposed the circular of June 1926, which demanded the expulsion of Communist Party members, and banned them from holding office in the Labour Party. The local Labour Party branded the Labour Party circular “disreputable and discreditable”.
Mack, already a Labour-Communist Councillor in Leeds, secured an alderman’s position on the Leeds City Council, he resigned from the council in 1927 on the grounds that he was “pending too much time outside the City”. Mack was active in the campaign against the Conservative Government’s Trade Union & Trade Dispute Bill in 1927. But he was also a prominent supporter of the Communist Party’s new united front organisation ‘The National Left Wing Movement’.
Mack remained active within the Leeds Labour Party, securing some support for the NLWM. It had been Joe Vaughan, the Communist councillor and mayor of Stepney, who was instrumental in setting up the NLWM in November 1925. Its first Secretary being Ralph Bond (see separate entry for Bon), a young communist activist. While its chairman was Will Crick of Manchester & Salford Trades Council. Other communists in the NLWM included Dr Robert Dunstan of Birmingham and C J Moody of Richmond. The NLWM headquarters were at Grays Inn Road, London, in the offices of the Sunday Worker. The National Left Wing Movement finally closed by the Party in 1929.
Will (W.T.E.) Brain, the Midlands Communist Party organiser and prominent activist in Birmingham Trades Council was selected as the Leeds Communist Party candidate for the South East constituency in 1929, where he secured 512 votes (4.2% of the vote).
In January J.D. Mack 1928 left Leeds and moved to Liverpool.
Source: `Labour heartland’ (West Yorkshire) Reynolds & Laybourn
Michael Walker
Arthur MacManus
Arthur MacManus was one of the leaders of the Clyde Workers' Committee during the First World War and was one of those deported to Edinburgh in 1916 following the dispute at Beardmores engineering works.
MacManus was originally a member of the Socialist Labour Party and a vociferous anti-conscription and anti-war agitator throughout the 1914-1918 period. He was instrumental in the formation of the CPGB in 1920 and was its first Chairman, as well as being a member of the executive committee of the Third International.
photograph of MacManus taken in 1914
On his death from illness, his ashes were interred in the wall of the Kremlin in Moscow in recognition of his role as a pioneer of communism.
Dai Maggs
A Communist Party member from the Sirhowy District of Monmouthsire, Maggs became a part-time Daily Worker sales organiser in the late 1930s.
John Mahon
John Mahon was born in Dublin in 1901, the son of John Lincoln Mahon, a comrade of both William Morris and Frederick Engels. The family soon moved to London, where they lived at Brixton. He was educated at St. Olive’s and St, Saviour’s Grammar School in Tooley Street, in Southwark. His first job was at Buck and Hickman, an engineering works in the East End of London.
He joined the Communist Party in 1920 and was very soon employed as a full-time political worker until his retirement. John Mahon was on the staff of the National Minority Movement, where h worked closely with Harry Pollitt. He was Pollitt’s campaign organiser in his election contest in Whitechapel and St. George’s.
Mahon was then Industrial Organiser and later became District Secretary of the London District Communist Party, a member of the Executive and Political Committees.
He died in 1975, shortly after completing his massive biography of Harry Pollitt.
Jimmy Maley
James Maley was born on February 19, 1908. His father, Ned, was from Mayo and his mother, Anne Sherlock, a Glaswegian. Raised in Stevenson Street in the Calton district of Glasgow's east end, the young Jimmy attended St Alphonsus. An older brother died young, leaving Jimmy, an older sister, Annie, two younger brothers, Willie and Timmy, and a younger sister, Mary. Jimmy worked from an early age helping his mother - a hawker - wheel her barrow around Glasgow.
In 1926, during the General Strike, hospitalised with pneumonia, Jimmy had part of his lung removed. Judged to be at death's door, he was given the last rites, but later recalled that heard the sound of distant music and pulled through. In 1929-30, Jimmy left Glasgow for Cleveland, Ohio, where three Irish aunts had emigrated but soon returned. In 1932, he joined the Communist Party, emerging as a noted public speaker at Glasgow Green. Whenever he walked along Argyle Street, trams tooted their horns, acknowledging him.
After hearing the famous Communist leader, Dolores Ibarruri, or La Pasionaria as she was better known, on the radio, Maley went to Spain in 1936 to fight for the Republican government against the insurgency by fascists under Franco. He left with a party of Glaswegians who travelled to London before embarking on a boat train to Paris and then Spain. He was in action at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937, part of a heavy-machine-gun company, covering the retreat for three days. During the battle of Jarama, Maley and his machine-gun company were left in no-man's land, low on ammunition. They hid among the olive trees for two days before being captured by fascist troops; subsequently, Maley was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.
News of his capture reached home in an astonishing way; for several months, his mother – who lived in the Carlton district of Glasgow - had heard nothing, but then one day, amazingly, she saw her son paraded with other prisoners on a newsreel shown at the local cinema. It was the last showing of the film, which was then sent on to Paisley. Mrs Maley travelled there and persuaded the projectionist to clip out a frame, which she was able to keep as a memento until her son returned home later in 1937, after being released in a prisoner swap.
At his mother's request, he didn't return to Spain but, back in Glasgow, Jimmy continued to speak on public platforms, often ones he carried under his own arm. Before the war he worked in Parkhead Forge, leading a strike. When war broke out, he served in Burma and India, where he made contact with Communists newly released from prison.
He worked in Maryhill Barracks as a telephone operator until 1947, walking home each night to his mother's house in Shettleston. Around this time, he went to the Highlander's Institute, a popular social venue, where he met his future bride. The 40-year old Jimmy had asked the 26-year old Anne Watt from Cowcaddens to dance and never let her dance with anyone else. Jimmy proposed within two weeks, and in March 1948 they were married. Within the next 14 years they had nine children together.
In August 1985 at the age of 77 Jimmy was arrested whilst selling an Irish Republican newspaper at an demonstration in the Lanarkshire town of Carfin. He was subsequently charged under Section 2 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) that: “He carried and displayed a document entitled ‘Ireland’s War’ in such a way and circumstances as to arouse reasonable apprehension that he was a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation, namely the IRA, contrary to Section 2 of the PTA.”
He was held in custody over the weekend despite the lack of facilities to cater for someone of his age. His case was finally heard at Hamilton Sheriff Court where, as well as being charged under the PTA, he was also charged with a Breach of the Peace. Jimmy pleaded not guilty to both charges and his trial was fixed for February 1986. A fulsome campaign was mounted to have the charges dropped and he subsequently received a letter from the Procurator Fiscal’s office conceding this.
In 1996, Maley returned to Spain for the first time since his deportation, to take part in a BBC radio documentary. James Maley died, aged 99, on 9th April 2007, having firmly been a life-long Communist.
Sources: Morning Star 11th April 2007; saoirse@iol.ie; The Herald, 14 April 2007
Colonel Cecil Malone MP
Lieutenant-Colonel Cecil J L’Estrange Malone MP was elected for East Leyton in 1918 as a Coalition Liberal candidate. As such, he found himself a member of the virulently anti-communist “Reconstruction Society” prior to a visit to Russia in September 1919. Its 1918 pamphlet, `Bolshevist Plot to Seize Power in Britain’, listed Malone as a member of the society’s executive.
In September 1919, Malone visited Russia, where he had talks with leading Bolsheviks and even joined Trotsky in a review of Red Army troops. The experience shifted him radically to the left and he wrote a sympathetic account, `Bolshevism at Work’, joined the British Socialist Party and subsequently, when the BSP fused with others into the Communist Party, became a founding member of the Party – and, hence, its very first MP. He was also a member of the first Central Committee of the Party.
But even before the Communist Party’s foundation, Malone endured the experience of being falsely denounced as a government agent by John Maclean, an outstanding opponent of World War I and supporter of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Maclean’s health had deteriorated badly after a period of incarceration and conspiracy theories had started to plague his mind. When his marriage broke down in 1919, he even claimed that the government was somehow directly responsible.
Despite his past adherence, Maclean began a dispute with the BSP over the Hands off Russia campaign, which between 1919 and 1920 saw major agitation to defend the revolution from outside intervention. Malone’s presence alongside Maclean and George Lansbury on the platform of the November 1919 Hands Off Russia meeting in Glasgow, focused Maclean’s paranoia on Malone and unleashed a sequence of events that led to the split between Maclean and the BSP.
After the rally, Maclean denounced Malone as a government agent, largely basing this on his past. The Reconstrction Society had attacked Maclean in its pamphlet, describing him as ‘a wild-looking schoolmaster’. But there was not a single shred of evidence, then or now, to prove Maclean’s allegations. The idea that Malone was an active counter-revolutionary, who had been sent into the workers’ movement to destroy it, found no support with either the Communist Party or the Comintern.
This did not deter Maclean from also then denouncing Theodore Rothstein, a prominent figure in the BSP, who was held in the highest esteem by the Bolsheviks and was in receipt of funds from Russia, which helped to launch the Communist Party. Undaunted, Maclean said the money was coming from the British government. Maclean’s relations with other leading figures came under serious strain due to his constant references to "spies" being present at public and private meetings.
When Maclean was billed along with Malone to address a big Hands Off Russia rally at London’s Albert Hall in February 1920, he refused to share a platform with an “agent”. After Rothstein revealed truthfully to Maclean that he was the Bolsheviks’ official representative in Britain, seeking to allay his fears, Maclean began to openly tell of how the cunning agent Rothstein had tried to fool him, when he knew full well that he was working for the British government!! The outcome was that Maclean was discretely dropped from speakers’ platforms of the Hands off Russia campaign. History is quite clear that Rothstein, the father of life-long British Communist, Andrew, was most definitely not an agent.
Malone’s personal commitment to the movement during this period seems, in retrospect, entirely genuine. The ruling circles distrusted and disliked his adherence to revolutionary socialism greatly. A secret report – only released decades later - to the Cabinet on the November 1919 meeting, where Maclean `found’ his suspicions of Malone, condemned the latter as a man ‘who is apparently so enamoured of Bolshevism that he is not ashamed as an ex-officer and a Member of Parliament to share a platform with a declared revolutionary’.
In November 1920, Malone received, a six-month sentence after making a speech in which he argued that during a revolution, in order to defend the workers against counter-revolutionary violence by the ruling class, it was legitimate to execute leading members of the bourgeoisie. ‘What, my friends’, he asked his audience, ‘are a few Churchills or a few Curzons on lampposts compared to the massacre of thousands of human beings?’
Given the suddenness of his conversion, though, the depth of Malone’s intellectual understanding of Communism was certainly questionable. James Klugmann, in his history of the Communist Party, states that Malone had joined the party “on an emotional rather than a reasoning basis; he was never a Marxist, and had little or no contact with the working class movement”.
Imprisonment seemingly caused Malone a rethink over involvement in revolutionary politics. After his release, he left the Communist Party and joined the ILP, subsequently moved over to the right of the Labour Party and eventually drifted out of the labour movement altogether. Maclean died young and entered labour movement mythology, Malone is almost unheard of!
Tom Mann
Tom Mann was of one British trades unionism’s most famous figures. He was born on 15th April 1856, in what is now a suburb of Coventry, the son of a clerk who worked at a colliery. He attended school from the ages of six to nine, then began work doing odd jobs on the colliery farm. A year later he became a trapper, a labour-intensive jobs that involved clearing blockages from the narrow airways in the mining shafts. In 1870, the colliery was forced to close and the family moved to Birmingham. Mann soon found work as an engineering apprentice and when he had finished with this, in 1877, he moved to London.
Initially, he was unable to find work as an engineer and took a series of unskilled jobs. In 1879, Mann found work in an engineering shop. Here he was introduced to socialism decided to improve his own education. His reading included the works of William Morris, Henry George and John Ruskin. In 1881 he joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and took part in his first strike. In 1884, he joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in Battersea. Here he met John Burns and Henry Hyde Champion, who encouraged him to publish a pamphlet calling for the working day to be limited to eight hours. Mann formed an organisation, the Eight Hour League, which successfully pressured the TUC to adopt the eight-hour day as a key goal.
After reading the Communist Manifesto in 1886, Mann became an avowed communist and never lost his belief in Marxism. When he moved to Newcastle, he organised the SDF in the north of England, and also managed Keir Hardie's electoral campaign in Lanark before returning to London in 1888, where he worked in support of the Bryant and May match factory strike. With Burns and Champion, he began producing a journal, the Labour Elector in 1888.
Along with Burns and Ben Tillett, Mann was one of the leading figures in the London Dock Strike in 1889. He was responsible for organising relief for the strikers and their families. With the support of other unions and various organisations, the strike was successful. Following the strike, Mann was elected President of the newly-formed Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers' Union, with Tillett as General Secretary. Tillett and Mann wrote a pamphlet called `New Unionism’. Mann was also elected to the London Trades and Labour Council and as secretary of the National Reform Union, and was a member of the Royal Commission on labour from 1891 to 1893.
In 1894, he was a founding member of the Independent Labour Party and became its Secretary in 1894. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the party in the 1895 General Election. In 1896 he was beaten in the election for Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. He helped create the International Transport Workers' Federation, and was its first President. He was deported from a number of European countries for organising trade unions.
Mann's political interests also grew during this time, and he became Secretary of the Independent Labour Party in 1894. Mann's career was truly international, and in 1896 he founded and became the first President of the International Transport Workers' Federation.
In 1901, Mann emigrated to Australia to see if that country's broader electoral franchise would allow more "drastic modification of capitalism". Settling in Melbourne he was active in Australian trade unions and became an organiser for the Australian Labor Party. However, he grew disillusioned with the party, believing it was being corrupted by the nature of government and concerned only with winning elections. He felt that the federal Labour MPs were unable and unwilling to change society, and their prominence within the movement was stifling and over-shadowing organised labour. He resigned from the ALP and founded the Victoria Socialist Party.
Returning to Britain in 1910, Mann wrote `The Way to Win’, which argued that socialism could only be achieved through trade unionism and co-operation. He founded the Industrial Syndicalist Education League, and worked as an organiser for Ben Tillett. He led the Liverpool transport strike of 1911, after which he was convicted of sedition. His prison sentence was quashed after public pressure. He was opposed to Britain's involvement in the First World War and, in 1917, he joined the British Socialist Party.
In 1919 he again ran for election as Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and was this time successful. He held the post until 1921, when he retired at the age of sixty-five. He welcomed the Russian Revolution and called for soviets to be formed in Britain. In 1920, he was a founder member of the Communist Party. Tom Mann was chairman of the National Minority Movement, from its formation in 1924 to 1929.
Mann continued to campaign for socialism publishing pamphlets and speaking at meetings in Britain and abroad, and he was arrested for sedition on several more occasions. He continued to be a popular figure in the labour movement, attracting large audiences to rallies and benefits. During the Spanish Civil War he wanted to fight on the Republican side, but was by that time far too old. A unit of the International Brigade, the Tom Mann Centuria, was named in his honour. Tom Mann died on the 13th March 1941.
Edith Mansell
Edith worked at Cadbury’s where she was a long-term activist for the Transport and General Workers Union. A highly motivated trades unionist, she would go to work early so as to meet members of the night shift, which she also represented, to ensure their problems were dealt with.
He father was Ted Mansell, a staunch member of the Communist Party, which Edith joined in the 1930s. She became a close comrade and friend of Daisy Vaughan and Jessie McCullough (see separate entry). A gutsy woman, Edith maintained a high level of activism in the Party, especially as an inveterate knocker of doors and seller of literature on the streets. She also served in the fire service during the war.
Edith was a delegate to Birmingham Trades Council and a regular elected delegate to the T&G’s Biennial Delegate Conference. A Co-op activist and sometime candidate for the local board of directors, Edith became justly identified with the highly successful Key Books during the 1970s, which she was manager of. She was chair of her Party branch when she died in around 1986.
sources: FW oration; GS personal knowledge
Beattie Marks
Born in 1903 in the east end of London, she joined the Communist Party ion 1920. Secretary of the Stepney branch she was active in the local Trades Council. Working full time at King Street from 1922, she was arrested in 1920. She was noted for her vigilance over admission to the Party centre, at a time when the Party had to be very security conscious. She worked for the Party until her retirement and was active in the Muswell Hill branch until her death in 1985.
Morning Star 5th August 1985
David Marshall
David Ronald Marshall was born on March 27th 1916 in Middlesbrough, to a railway worker father and a mother who had been a lady’s maid. Both parents were committed Methodists and well-read individuals, perhaps influencing Marshall’s academic success at school and later his deep commitment to poetry. Certainly, by the time he had left school to work as a clerk in the unemployment benefit office he already had a deep love of poetry, especially Keats.
Having spent the period of the sixth form in escapist retreat from the harsh reality around him, he became enthused by the alternative spirit of the Spanish Popular Front. Marshall forged a letter of permission from his father (David would not pass the age of majority until March of the following years) to enable himself to explore the new experiment. Almost as soon as he had made such preparations, the fascist rebellion had begun and David was in the thick of it.
Marshall was thus one of the first British volunteers to fight in the Spanish civil war. Having arrived in Barcelona on September 4th 1936, he joined the Tom Mann Centuria, a predecessor of the International Brigades, and shortly after he signed up to the Communist Party. The Centuria was incorporated into the English Section of the Thaelmann Battalion and, after rapid training, was put up directly against Fascist troops without any artillery back up at all. In November, Marshall took a sniper’s bullet in his ankle at Cerro de los Angeles, having to been moved back the line under heavy fire. After hospital treatment in Alicante, he was sent back to Britain to aid the wider campaign.
Marshall’s immediate poetry following his Spanish experience has been considered amongst his best, especially his `Retrospect’, included in an anthology of poems for Spain alongside the more celebrated MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day Lewis.
Like many Spanish veterans, he was initially considered too unreliable to be able to join the British armed forces, although he did join the Royal Engineers eventually and participates in the Normandy landings of 1944 and the liberation of Belsen.
He returned to Middlesborough in 1947 to work in the Ministry of Labour once again but a life of conventionality was not for Marshall. In late 1947, he and others purchased an old house to refurbish and open as offices and a club for the Party and YCL. The carpentry and other skills that he acquired in the process saw him move into a grander project still. From 1950 and for the next decade, Marshall was the secretary for the Middlesborough Trades Union Club. He and a team of volunteers built a hall to hold 500 people, with a stage suitable for rallies, lectures, film shows, concerts and dances. In 1961, he moved to London to work as a joiner with the Theatre Workshop under Joan Littlewood’s direction, building scenery for theatre projects and exhibitions.
He married Joyce Ritson in January 1939, with whom he would have a daughter and a son. When Joyce died of cancer in 1975, Marshall refurbished a 90’ sailing barge to live on and hire out for events. This gave way to an 85’ barge on which he lived until 1992, when he went to live with his long time lover, actress Marlene Sidaway.
He continued to write poetry throughout his life, finally producing a book of poems covering his life from Spain to the present in the year of his death, when he passed away aged 89:
I wish I were back
I wish I were back in the trenches round Madrid
Along with the chicos, among the strangeness of tongues:
Strong in my body, testing it thus and thus,
Half wondering that my flesh can bear these things.
Glad in my loneliness, wrapt in my alien thoughts;
My quaintness cloaking me, like cold air
Stirring on the skin when putting off familiar clothes -
Just as I stepped out of my time-pocked life
Into this
Guardian October 29th 2005
Martin Marshall
As a young man, he could have had a career in opera but preferred to stay with his family and be engaged politically. Also a talented painter, his activities for the Communist Party in the 1930s included campaigning for aid to Spain and organising the Birmingham tenants’ strike of 1939. In 1940, he became a founding member of Birmingham’s Clarion Choir. Along with his wife, Elsie, and was an active and leading member, indeed Chair, until his death in 1984.
Source: `Shining Vision’, programme for Clarion tribute to Martin Marshall 20th April 1985
Gordon Massie
Born 1916, Massie was a farm labourer in his youth. He served in the tank corps in North Africa, Italy and Germany during the Second World War. An outstanding leader of steel workers in Scotland, he was victimised by the steel employers but was able to return to the industry and lead the fight against closure for the Clydebridge plant.
Long-time union convenor at Clydebridge steelworks, Massie was variously also Chair of Cambuslang Trades Council, Glasgow Tenants Association and President of the Scottish Tenants Organisation. He was the recipient of awards of merit from his union, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (now `Community’), and the Scottish TUC, chairing the latter’s Scottish Steel Industry Committee. Gordon Massie was a member of the ISTC’s national steel industry committee and the Communist Party’s National Steel Advisory Committee for many years and chaired the latter during the fight in the 1970s struggles against the closure of Lanarkshire steel-making.
He led an 18 month rent strike in Cambuslang in 1981/2 and helped win a rent freeze in 1984/5, as well as a very beneficial new tenants’ lease. As Chair of the Cambuslang and Rutherglen trades council, he led the fantastic campaign to raise £25,000 locally for the miners during the great strike of 1984/5. Massie was also the guiding light behind the formation of the Cambuslang Unemployed Workers Association.
A member of the Communist Party all his adult life, he was expelled by the revisionist leadership only a few weeks before his death in 1985 at the age of 69.
Morning Star 28th September 1985; 4th October 1985
Betty Matthews
Born Elizabeth Lynette on March 14th 1914 in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to an Australian farmer father and Scottish teacher mother, she came to England in 1936. Having joined the CPGB, she debated risk forfeiting the fees promised from her Scottish aunt for her further education by refusing to be a debutante and presented at court. She was successful in her objection and then went to the London School of Economics. Eric Hobsbawm knew her from her days at the LSE.
She was involved in Cable Street, meeting her husband at this time, George Matthews, who was preparing to become a Bedfordshire farmer. Both she and George became full-time party workers after the war. She was initially district secretary for the South-East Midlands District, then London District Organiser. This latter post, she later said, was the unhappiest period of her political life. From 1967 to 1978, she was national education organiser.
The Matthews enjoyed annual visits to Italy, possibly a factor in making Betty, in particular, open to the interpretations Antonio Gramsci’s writings that became, by the mid-1970s, the hallmark of the British revisionism often called Euro-Communism. Certainly, as the 1970s euro-communists became CP full-timers, Betty gave them quiet support.
As an editorial board member of Marxism Today, as it was being recast in a new and critical role by Martin Jacques, she was a key supporter, whom he regarded as one of the architects of the magazine studied iconoclasm.
Her childless marriage with George lasted 62 years, until her death on May 24th 2002, aged 88 after a car crash.
Morning Star May 30th 2002
Doug Matthews
National Agricultural Workers Union activist and life-long member of the Communist Party, Matthews was a strong supporter of the Communist rural journal `Country Standard’. Matthews was active in Biggleswade Trades Council, a Bedfordshire village with a history of Communist Party activism. He died in August 1959
Michael Walker
George Lloyd Matthews
Born January 24th 1917, he came from a well to do farming family in Sandy, Bedfordshire. His father, who owned a 500 acre farm and market garden, was a staunch Methodist and Liberal, hence the homage to Lloyd George as a middle name. After public school, he began working on the farm from the age of 14. Matthews went to Reading University in 1937 to study agriculture.
Immersed in student politics, he became Vice President of Reading University Labour Federation and Vice President of the NUS and this contributed to his failing to complete his degree. He joined the Communist Party in 1938 but kept his membership secret for a short while being adopted the following year as prospective candidate for the Labour Party for the Mid-Bedfordshire constituency. However, he very quickly left the Labour Party to enable his CPGB membership to become open. Trying to join up in 1939, he found himself in a rejected for being in the reserved occupation of farmer.
Elected to the CPGB central committee in 1943, he remained on the Party’s leading committees until 1979. Matthews was elected to the largely administrative position of Assistant General Secretary in 1949. Along with Harry Pollitt and Rajani Palme Dutt, he was a CPGB delegate to the seminal 20th congress of the CPSU, at which Khrushchev made revelations about the criminal actions of the leadership of Stalin.
As a talented writer, he was moved to the Daily Worker, as deputy editor in 1956, in the wake of the controversy of the intervention in Hungary, and became its editor in 1959, after J R Campbell’s retirement, until 1974. Many who worked with him considered him a “skilful” editor and he was at the helm when the paper was renamed the Morning Star in April 1966. His time as editor saw a big change in the paper’s style, with more coverage of culture and wider social movements, in particular ending a mainstream sexist slant unacceptable to a more enlightened period increasingly influenced by a feminist critique of such things. However, he left the editorship at a time of controversy over its direction to become head of press and publicity for the Party. From 1979, he was curator of the Party’s archives.
From hereon, Matthews played a key role in the Euro-Communist dominated Executive Committee assault on the paper’s editorship under Tony Chater, which led to a breach in 1984. As the CPGB neared dissolution, Matthews began to reject the earlier stance he had taken in supporting CPGB policy on issues such as the initial imperialist character of world war two and the assigning of the problems of socialist democracy to the syndrome of the Stalin personality cult.
He was instrumental in making revelations about the secret Soviet funding of the CPGB from the 1950s and the supposed issuing of orders from the CPSU to the highest Party leadership in Britain. Matthews, along with his long time partner, Betty Matthews, was a leading advocate of the dissolution of the CPGB into the short-lived Democratic Left, if not rejecting his lifetimes’ commitment to progressive values then at least denying the validity of the communist project that he had been so much a part of. George Matthews died on March 20th 2005, aged 88.
Guardian April 8th 2005; Morning Star April 9th 2005
Alf Maunders
Born in Peckham in 1908, Alf joined the Communist Party in its founding years. He was a local organiser of the National Unemployed Workers Movement and a comrade of Wally Hannington. Amongst many struggles, he was involved in the occupation of the Cafe Royal by the unemployed and a number of fierce battles with the police in Hyde Park in the 1930s. More notably, Alf organised the first successful rent strike of the period at the privately run Nigel Buildings, triggering a wave of tenant’s action in working class London boroughs and beyond.
The first decisive tenants’ battles had been in 1915, when a mass rent strike on the Clyde sparked a major movement across Britain, which was especially led by women. In the run up to the end of the First World War major actions followed in Leeds and Bradford followed suit. Within a year rent strikes were being called across Britain. When strikes were called in Woolwich and parts of south London, in Handsworth and Lozells in Birmingham, munitions industry bosses were so worried that they forced Lloyd George to order local rents to be reduced. Some 1,000 tenants struck in Edmonton, and protests in Barrow against evictions led to copycat actions in Workington and Coventry. This movement won the first legal controls on landlords raising rents. The next decade saw a major growth in the social housing sector, which for a time diminished the need for such major tenants’ actions.
The Communist Party had been at the heart of this struggle fifteen to twenty years before Alf joined the Party. But, as a youth, he surely would have been more than conscious of the experience of the generation before him. As the recession bit hard in Britain, from 1931, private tenants saw racked rents and insufficient investment made slum conditions worse. The London Communist Party in particular once again thrust itself into tenants’ struggles and scores of epic struggles ensued.
This new phase began with the struggle to improve the lot of the tenants of the privately owned Nigel Buildings. These were a notorious run down series of tenement blocks that were infested with vermin in Peckham, south-east London, now in the borough of Southwark. The landlord increased the rent by a penny a week and so Alf organised the tenants to withhold their rent. Barricades against the bailiffs were erected around the buildings and local people organised to bring in food and supplies. After several months (one source speaks of the longest of such strikes being of 21 weeks during, and this may well be the Nigel Buildings affair), unsuccessful attempts by bailiffs and police (including mounted police) seeking to storm the barricaded tenements, the landlords gave in and reduced the rent. Alf was arrested and imprisoned for assaulting a bailiff at some point in the struggle.
Copycat actions now spread across the capital, especially in London’s east end. Women once again were at the heart of the tenants' fightback, during the course of which the Communist Party helped local tenants fight against slum conditions and extortionate rents. Future Communist MP, Phil Piratin, wrote, “Tens of thousands of working class men and women had organised themselves for common struggle ... committees were formed, and hundreds of people who had never been on a committee and had no experience of organisation or politics learned those things, and learned them well.”
Following Nigel Buildings, it became the norm in tenants’ struggles in London to barricade the housing blocks to keep out rent collectors, bailiffs and the police. Sentries were posted day and night. Tenants defended themselves with saucepans, rolling pins, sticks and shovels. The rent strikes were epics and gained national publicity, resulting in a wave of emulation around the country. A government feeling vulnerable on the eve of war once again had to give in to tenants' demands. Rents were cut and evictions halted.
A few years later, militant rent struggles were emulated by the Communist Party in Birmingham amongst thousands of council house tenants in 1939, and reprised in London and throughout the provinces in the squatters’ movement immediately after the end of the war in 1945.
Aside from his role in the tenants’ movement, Alf was also part of the Communist anti-fascist organisation at the battle of Cable Street. He also helped to organise anti-fascist actions in Camberwell and Peckham against Mosley’s Blackshirts and William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw). He always enjoyed telling the story of how Joyce, when climbing on a lorry to speak at the Heaton Arms in Peckham, was swiftly felled by a flying bottle and carried off unconscious never to return. I suspect it was he that threw the bottle at Joyce but he would never admit it!
Around 1935, after accepting a challenge from the local Tory MP to go to the Soviet Union he was offered a one way ticket! Alf travelled overland to Moscow and attended a reception within the Kremlin. He met Kalinin and Dimitrov, a fact of which he was very proud, and often recounted the story of how Stalin entered the room and walked by smiling. Alf joined a British trade union delegation in Red Square to watch a Red Army parade. He also met a young Mao Tse Tung on the platform. On returning to Britain, he had to travel secretly across Nazi Germany with the help of German CP members. Whilst in Hamburg, he was nearly captured by the Gestapo and was smuggled across the North Sea on a tug.
After serving in the RAF during the war, as a skilled carpenter/joiner in the post-war period he took part in many industrial disputes as a shop steward for the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers, and was blacklisted on several building sites. Alf supported the Soviet Union over the 1956 Hungary and 1968 Czechoslovakia events, believing that an enemy of the Soviet Union was an enemy of the working class. A firm Marxist-Leninist, he was not a great lover of the “British Road”, arguing that the capitalist class would never give up power by peaceful means. A lifelong reader and supporter of the Daily Worker and Morning Star, Alf passed away aged 84 in 1991.
Dick Maunders
Stanley Mayne
Mayne began his political education in the Socialist Sunday School in south-east London. As a clerical officer, he was active in the Civil Service Association, of which he was an executive member. He played a key role in the ultimately victorious campaign for direct promotion in the civil service through the clerical grades to administrative status. He became general secretary of the Institution of Professional Civil Servants, the creation of which he was known as the architect, and remained in post until his retirement in 1961. A life-long supporter of the Daily Worker and Morning Star, he died in 1988.
Morning Star 30th December 1988
Jim McCallum
Born on 5th April 1936 in Carriden, West Lothian, McCallum was a Communist from his teens, for `Big Jim’, as he was invariably known, came from a staunch Party family. A leading union activist for two decades at Kinneil Colliery in Bo’ness on the Forth, when that closed in 1984, he was elected pit delegate, the key position in any pit, at his new colliery, Bogside, north of the Forth, within three months of transfer. A significant strategist in the NUM, he was to the fore during the great strike of 1984-5, representing the union widely, including speaking at a massive rally in Finland. He was a member of the Scottish Area NUM Executive Committee from 1972 to 1984. A key figure in the long campaign to win peace in Vietnam, he was also active in Anti-Apartheid, CND and the British-Soviet Friendship Society. Big Jim died on 15th October 1992
Jim McCallum
The Independent n.d. October 1992
Alec McCollough
Born in 1910, like his brother, Walter, Alec was also a Glasgow carpenter who came south looking for work. Alec joined the Communist Party aged 25. He was first married to Nancy with whom he had three children before being widowed and remarrying to Noreen. An Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers (later to become part of UCATT) shop steward and delegate to the union’s conference, he twice won an election for a full-time officer’s position but found his victory snatched away from him on technicalities arising from the machination of the union’s right-wing.
Alec was a member of Birmingham Trades Council from 1938, later a member of its EC. A staunch Co-operator, he served on the Board of Directors of the local Co-op and was a delegated member of Birmingham City Council’s Education Committee from 1954. In later life he became clerk of works for Sandwell Borough Council and performed the same function for the Party during the course of the building of its new premises, the Key Books and later also the Star Club in Essex Street, Birmingham. Alec served on the Midlands Party District Committee for 12 years and was a municipal candidate for the Party; he died in July 1991.
Source: Frank Watters’ speech on the occasion of MDCP celebration of Alec McCollough’s 65th birthday c. 1975; GS personal knowledge
Pat McConnochie
A veteran Ayrshire Communist since 1940 and a boilermaker by trade, McConnochie worked in shipyards around the country. He settled in the London area for a while before returning to Scotland, becoming heavily involved in community politics in Irvine, for example being a founder of a local credit union and campaigning on rents and the poll tax. He died aged 75 in 1996.
Morning Star 27th May 1996
Alex McCrindle
Alex McCrindle, who was born on 3rd August 1911 in Glasgow, started work at the age of 10 years, delivering milk. At 15, he left school and got a job in a timer merchants’ office. He started his acting career playing heroes in plays put on by the Boys Brigade. Later, after moving to Glasgow and getting a job as a manager of a hardware firm, he joined the Glasgow Clarion Players. A pioneer Scottish theatre group with strong links to the Communist Party, this was a predecessor of Glasgow Unity and Glasgow Citizens.
McCrindle went to WEA lectures on drama at Glasgow University and had become so engaged in theatrical matters that he had to choose to give up his hardware career. He was lucky to be able to become an indentured apprentice at Queen Theatre in London, at the north end of Kew Bridge. He finished up as an electrician but became immersed in the world of theatre and actors along the way.
He eventually became a formable actor himself. In the period 1937-9, he appeared in a dozen plays on the first broadcasts of television, including `Juneo and the Paycock’, before the medium was closed down for the duration of the war, sometimes being credited as Alex McCringle or Alex McGrindle, as well as in his own name. he was also in the cast of the classic Hitchcock film, `The 39 steps’, although he was more proud of his nationwide tour of `Six men of Dorset’, about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, in 1937
McCrindle began a history of the actors’ union, Equity, but was unable to finish it due to being called up for the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He produced the first ever play performed on board a RN ship during war, `Androcles and the Lion’, transmitted over the Tannoy!
He starred in the British BBC radio show `Dick Barton Special Agent’ from 1946-51, which ran for 700 episodes and had 15 million listeners. Alex played the role of Jock Anderson one of Dick Barton’s key henchmen and was widely loved for the role and enormously popular in it. In 1947, he was producer of the TV programme `Larry the Lamb’.
The cast of Dick Barton Special Agent, from left: Alex McCrindle (centre) c.1948. © BBC Photo Library
Although he also branched out very successfully into scriptwriting, McCrindle was effectively blacklisted because of his Communist and Equity activities for much of the important years of his career, especially from the late 1940s to the end of the 1950s. In the 1950s, he appeared – often uncredited to escape the blacklist– in a string of small budget movies as a character actor. But, in the main, blacklisting resulted in him devoting more time to building up Equity and securing improved pay and conditions for Actors, to meet this objective he was sent by his union to found Scottish Equity, which only had 15 members before he began his work. He worked at this full-time for the next seven years, leaving the union in a flouring position north of the border. In this period, he only worked in British television and then only twice during the early 1960s.
In the later stage of his career, he began to secure significant parts in films and TV programmes from `The Saint’ in 1965, and then through many other projects, with increasingly more significant parts, to `All Creatures Great and Small’ and `Taggart’ and then, in the 1977 first `Star Wars’ movie in which he played a rebel general.
George Lucas, short of capital, offered the actors on the movie "points" in lieu of salary. Big stars such as Alec Guinness, could afford to indulge in some capitalist speculation and take "points" and, in the event, the film proved to be the best move Guinness ever made financially. "Hollywood thought Darth Vader was a tough nut," one luvvie has recalled, "but they hadn’t met Alex."! He campaigned through Equity for bonuses for all actors in Star Wars, among them R2-D2 (who was played, or operated inside, by Birmingham born Kenny Baker), who also took a working wage and contributed to the success of Star Wars.
Alex had a great love of Scottish poetry and regularly read it aloud to audiences. He produced and read his own selection of 37 poems by William Soutar (Glasgow, Scotsoun, 1989) and raised money for Brownsbank Cottage.
He was married twice, the first was Sandy, the second wife, Honor Arundel, the Communist children’s author and Daily Worker film critic. (See entry for Honor Arundel.) The home of McCrindle and Arundel in the fifties was always a hub of Party activity and organisation, as the writer Doris Lessing notes in her autobiography. Alex became close friends with Paul Strand, the famous photographer, and was a major asset to Strand’s in his `Tir a’Mhurain’ photography project. He went onto become Strand’s agent in Scotland, negotiating with Compton Mackenzie and visiting the School of Scottish Studies in order to help set up the project.
In the 1980s, with US screenings no longer debarred to him, he appeared in dozens of major roles on television mini-series, including "Reilly: The Ace of Spies" and in film such as `Eye of the Needle’. As late as 1987 he played the role of a jailer in `Comrades’, the film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
Alex McCrindle’s obituary in the Times was headlined ‘Communist stalwart’ and stated that he remained committed to an ‘unrelenting Marxism which lost nothing of its purity and uncompromising severity’. His daughter Jean also became involved in politics and an award for drama was named after him. Alex McCrindle died on April 20, 1990 in Edinburgh.
Sources: Morning Star 18th August 1986; The Times 28 April 1990; Michael Walker
Nan McMillan
(1906-2002) Teacher and union activist, died at the age of 96. Born in 1906 the sixth of 12 children in a working class family in Bermondsey, south London. Exceptionally talented, she won a Junior County Scholarship to St Saviour's and St Olave's Girls Grammar School. Political activity began in her teens when she campaigned for the return to parliament of Dr. Salter.
Trained as a teacher at Furzedown College in London, on graduation offered a secondary school post, specialising in English. She met David Capper, CPGB founding member, at a Labour League for Youth dance and they married in 1936. As a married woman teacher, Nan had to keep her marriage secret until the bar on employing married women was lifted.
First Chairperson of the London Women's Parliament during the war. President of the National Union of Women Teachers in 1940, rejoining NUT in 1955, when it accepted equal pay. President of Camberwell NUT in 1950s. In 1952 appointed to her first headship. In 1963, became President of London Teachers’ Association. Delegate over many years to NUT annual conferences. At the age of 59, appointed Head of the large and ethnically diverse Sarah Siddons Comprehensive School for girls in Westminster and spent six years there before retiring in 1971.
Retired from teaching in 1971. Moved to Dorset when Capper died in 1974.and joined local District Committee of CPGB. In retirement, was involved in the Dorset Against the Cuts Campaign, CND, the Christchurch and District Women's Group and her local Pensioners Group. Her energetic campaigning on a range of local and national issues attracted the attention of the local press, which ran articles on her life under headlines such as 'Still campaigning at the age of 83' and 'Former head teacher who lived in sin!' She was also sought out for television programmes such as 'School Rules' and '20/20 Vision's History of Education'.
Education for Tomorrow Autumn 2002 No75
Mick McGahey
As vice-president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Mick McGahey was a driving force behind the transformation of the union in the 1970s.
Born on May 29th 1925, in Shotts, the militant centre of the Lanarkshire coalfield, he moved as a child with his family to Cambuslang, near Glasgow His mother was a devout Catholic but his father, James McGahey, who worked in the local pit as a checkweighman, was a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. James McGahey spent a year in prison out of events arising from the 1926 General Strike. One of his children died while he was inside, a petition supported even by the priest to allow him to attend the funeral was denied.
At the age of 14, Mick followed his father into the mining industry and later into the Communist Party. He took his first union role at the age of 18 and was influenced early in the Scottish working class environment that stressed learning. Though he had little formal education he quickly became absorbed into a culture that regarded books as treasures, becoming an avid reader. He went to Communist Party classes and schools organised by the Scottish Area of the NUM. A particular hero was John MacLean, the Scottish revolutionary and teacher.
,
McGahey first came to public notice in 1948 when he spoke passionately against an unofficial strike, in the recently nationalised coal industry. Abe Moffat, the leader of the Scottish miners, encouraged McGahey’s passage through the union hierarchy. Within 10 years he moved from branch delegate to full-time area president by 1967. He then went to live in Liberton, just outside Edinburgh, with his wife, Cathy, and his three young children.
By 1971 McGahey was nationally known and unsuccessfully stood against Joe Gormley for the presidency of the union. Two years later he became the NUM’s vice-president, a position he retained until his retirement in 1986. From 1982 to 1986 he was a member of the TUC General Council.
Noted for a strong breadth of vision, McGahey was outstandingly influential in the mining industry. A self-taught working class intellectual, he could recite Robert Burns and Shakespeare at length and was known for a sharp interest in literature generally. When Lawrence Daly, also a Scot and then the general secretary of the NUM, ended a speech in favour of an incomes policy with a quote from Shakespeare, McGahey immediately undermined the force of this, by saying: "Comrades. Lawrence should have completed the quotation" — and then went on to do so, turning Daly’s argument on its head.
McGahey, as Scottish area president, broke a tradition of insularity to other coalfields. He was the undisputed leader of the uniquely talented group of activists in the NUM who mobilised miners for the 1972 and 1974 strikes, humiliating Edward Heath's Tory government twice. Readers of tabloid newspaper regularly learned to vilify him `Red Mick’, no no-one who knew him did!
Chair of the Communist Party for a period, he was a Party loyalist through and through, backing the CPGB leadership in its war with the Morning Star. Nonetheless, after the dissolution of the CPGB, he joined the Communist Party of Scotland and privately let his doubts about revisionism be known. He died of emphysema aged 73 on January 30th 1999.
The Guardian February 1st 1999; Glasgow Herald February 2nd 1999
Leo McGree
Leo Joseph McGree was born in 1900 in Seacombe, Cheshire, the son of an Irish father and Scottish mother. At the age of fourteen, he left school and embarked upon a number of short-lived jobs before finding work in Sheffield. It was while in Sheffield he joined the communist party and met his future wife Hetty. He moved to Edge Hill, Liverpool and at the age of 21 was elected branch secretary for the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers union.
He was also a key figure in ensuring that the Daily Worker was distributed on Merseyside after the newspaper distribution networks refused to carry the paper because of its political content. He would meet the London train at 04.20 and he and other Communists would courier it throughout the region. He was a regular local public speaker; in one famous speech he denounced sectarianism which blighted Liverpool politics by stating “You fools, you fight each other every 12th of July and 17th of March, but forget about your empty bellies for the rest of the year”.
Leo became a doughty local election candidate for the Party, spearheading a strong tradition in the area, where Communist candidates did surprisingly well, outside of the more usually expected base of Scotland, Wales and the east end of London. The first Communist candidate in Liverpool was J. Young in St Anne's Ward in 1924; in 1925 J. Nield secured 706 or 16% of the vote in the same ward.
Leo first stood as a Communist council candidate in September 1928 for Edge Hill Ward, Liverpool. Later, he stood in Scotland North ward in 1930, receiving 18% of the vote and stood again in 1931 and 1932. He also stood for the parliamentary seat of Liverpool - Scotland, securing by 6%
Other Liverpool Communist council candidates in the 1930s were Mrs Bruce (Scotland North 1931, who received 12% of the vote), W. Fielding (Scotland North 1933), I.P. Hughes (Sandhills 1932), J F Hedley (Low Hill 1932) , A.E Cole (Kirkdale 1932), F.W. Gibson (Brunswick 1933), C.W Heaton (Croxteth 1932, Edge Hill 1933).
Leo’s work within the Communist Party was recognized with his election to the Communist Party Central Committee in 1929 to 1935. He also became a recognized leader of the unemployed in Merseyside in the 1930’s and in 1932, when major disturbances broke out in Birkenhead. On the 13th September, 10,000 unemployed demonstrated to the Public Assistance Committee with the demand for `relief for all able bodied unemployed and an increase of 3s per week, immediate supply of boots and clothes and one hundred weight of coal during winter months and starting of work schemes at trade union rates’. Joe Rawlings and Mrs Barraskill led the deputation to the Council; the local authority agreed to send a telegram to the government calling for the abolition of the means test.
However, as the demonstration dispersed the police made a number of arrests, two days later rioting broke out fuelled by indiscriminate baton charges by the police against women and children. Over 100 protesters and bystanders were hospitalised by the Police. The entire local branch committee of the National Unemployed Workers Movement were arrested. Leo was heavily involved in the protests and received a serious beating from the police and sentenced to twenty months imprisonment at Strangeways (Rawlings received a two-year sentence).
Birkenhead’s stand led to similar Unemployed demonstrations in Liverpool on 21st September, Glasgow, West Ham, Croydon, North Shield and importantly Belfast) Leo had also managed to spend some time during this period collecting funds for the striking Cotton workers in Burnley. When Mosley’s fascists tried to rally in Walton, it was Leo and local communists who organised the opposition.
Ewan McColl even wrote a song about the Birkenhead unemployed a parody of popular song of the day:
Forward unemployed, forward unemployed,
Led by the NUWM,
We fight against the cuts again.
From fighting Birkenhead, we've learnt our lesson well.
We'1I send the National Government
And the means test all to Hell.
At the 1946 Liverpool City council municipal election, Leo McGree then district secretary of the Building Trades Federation union stood as the Communist candidate for North Scotland ward. While McGree had popular support, it was clear that the Catholic Church was not going to let him be elected and Church dignitaries issued a number of statements denouncing Communism and McGree in particular.
He stood on a platform of demanding a new prefab school to replace the blitzed St Albans School and a feeding centre for children from the overcrowded St Sylvester’s School, who had to travel by tram to another school one and a half miles away for their mid-day meal. Another “menacing problem” was the delay in cleaning up the blitzed sites. It was not until four houses collapsed killing one child and injuring others did the council call a special meeting to discuss the dangers and then the Conservative councillors voted down the clean up plans.
Leo McGree was the only TUC delegate ever to move reference back of the Obituaries section of the General Council report, this being on the grounds that it included a reference to the death of former NUR leader, J H Thomas!
McGree was elected the District President of the Confederation of shipbuilding & Engineering Unions, but in the climate of the cold war anti communism he was witch hunted by the Daily Express newspaper and then by his union, being banned from office because of his political allegiance. He remained a committed communist all his life and when he died in 1967 large crowds attended his funeral at Anfield cemetery, testifying to his local popularity.
Source: J. Arnison `Leo McGree - what a man’ (London 1980) - Michael Walker
Billy McLafferty
A prominent Clydeside Scottish AEU engineering workers’ activist and life-long Communist, Billy McLafferty died aged 71 in 1990.
Morning Star 16th November 1990
Gordon McLennan
Gordon McLennan, a past General Secretary of the Communist Party, was born in 1924 and is still alive. Having joined the Young Communist League at the age of 15, McLennan served on the YCL Executive Committee from 1942-1947. He became a full time worker for the Party in Scotland, first as Glasgow City Organiser, then Glasgow City Secretary, then Scottish District Organiser and, in 1956, the Scottish Secretary. Having joined the national Executive of the Party in 1957, he became National Organiser of the Party in 1966 and General Secretary in 1975, succeeding John Gollan (see separate entry).
In his role as National Organiser, he became responsible for the Young Communist League, which he steered to make major changes in the 1960s and early 1970s in a revisionist direction. In the 1980s, he played a decisive role in creating circumstances where a major division of the Communist Party ensued. Enormous numbers of committed activists left or were excluded or expelled and some re-established the Communist Party in 1988, leaving the increasingly fragmented shell to continue for some four years. In the meantime, McLennan retired in 1990 to allow Nina Temple to succeed him; in short measure, she had prepared for the dissolution of the shell of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In retirement, McLennan became a highly visible activist in the Lambeth pensioners’ movement.
His pamphlets for the Communist Party include:
`Report on electoral work to the Communist Party’s 27th Congress’ (1961)
`Celebrate the 80th birthday of William Gallacher’ (1961)
`Quit the market - join the world’ (1975)
`Oppose Tory policies: take Britain on a different course’ (1982?)
Harry McLevy
Entering the engineering industry as an apprentice, Harry McLevy first came to prominence during the Clydeside apprentices’ strike of the 1950s. He returned to his home town of Dundee after completing his apprenticeship, continued to be active in the local left of the AEU until he became the local union district secretary.
He was prominent in local politics, standing as both a parliamentary and municipal election candidate for the Party. He served on both the Scottish and national Executive Committee of the Communist Party in this period. In 1984, he moved to Glasgow to take up the position of Scottish Secretary of the AEEU and was a member of the STUC’s general council and a former STUC president. Harry died on Christmas Eve 1995 at the age of 59.
Morning Star December 27th 1995
Sean McLoughlin
McLoughlin was born in Dublin in June 1895. He became involved in republican politics at the age of 15, and five years later, shortly before his twenty-first birthday, took part in the Easter 1916 Rising of the Army of the Irish Republic, the combined force of Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizens Army.
In this he was part of a unit that took over the Mendicity Institute, with the aim of preventing the movement of British troops from the adjacent Royal Barracks into the city centre. After the fall of the Mendicity, he escaped to the GPO. There, his leadership qualities and ability to think and act decisively under heavy fire were so outstanding, that James Connolly, as Commandant General, with the support of Pearse, had promoted the 19 year old Lieutenant to the top of military command, after he himself sustained severe injuries on the previous day. (Peter de Rossa's book 'Rebels' says "Thus the rising ended with a fifteen-year-old as Commandant of the Dublin Division...") As the last Commandant General, McLoughlin was the highest ranking of the rebels to survive. McLoughlin was instrumental in ensuring that as many volunteers as possible got away from the bombed-out GPO, as Pearse presided over a surrender.
McLoughlin was then interned in Wales and England and, after release from prison in December 1916, became an organiser of the Irish Volunteers in Tipperary. He became increasingly involved in socialist politics, joining the Socialist Party of Ireland and was very prominent in both British and Irish Communist circles. McLoughlin embarked upon two long speaking tours in Scotland and Northern England, organised by the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) during 1920-21. These meetings were often attended by thousands of workers and were usually described by local SLP branches as the best they had ever organised since he had become by now a mass orator of exceptional ability.
“McLoughlin was also an innovative theoretician …
Unlike most socialists of that era McLoughlin felt that socialism would be established in Ireland before Britain. He believed that this would detonate uprisings throughout the British Empire, which would in turn precipitate the destruction of capitalism in Britain itself. Taking an internationalist position, McLoughlin felt that the triumph of socialism in Britain would be the only way that an Irish socialist republic could survive in the long term. As a result of this analysis, he urged Irish and British workers to support both Irish independence, and the socialist movements in both countries.” (McGuire)
McLoughlin returned to Ireland in July 1922, following the outbreak of Civil War as an opponent of the Treaty, he joined the Communist Party of Ireland, (CPI), which was led by 21-year old Roddy Connolly, the son of James. The CPI strategy was to fight alongside the IRA, against the neo-colonialist Free State administration, whilst encouraging the republicans to adopt a socialist programme that would win the support of workers and small farmers.
McLoughlin now commanded an IRA flying column in Limerick, spreading socialist ideas within the local republican movement in the process. In December 1922, he was captured and sentenced to death by the Free State. The sentence was not executed and he was eventually released in October 1923, after the IRA had been crushed.
The CPI was disbanded in January 1924, so McLoughlin decided to work with Jim Larkin, who had returned to Ireland some months previously. An acrimonious split between the two, following Larkin’s disastrous handling of a rail workers strike, precipitated his departure from Irish socialist politics nine months later, when McLoughlin moved permanently to England.
Initially, he moved to Hartlepool and then to Sheffield sometime in the 1920s. Jailed yet again around the time of the General Strike, Sean McLoughlin was active in Sheffield with Jack Murphy. McLoughlin slowly faded from revolutionary activity. He struggled badly with ill-health in his later years. His last known address was 77 Lees Hall Road, Sheffield in the late 1940s-early 1950s. McLoughlin died largely unknown in Sheffield, aged just 64, in February 1960.
Information from “History Ireland” supplied by Keith Stoddart; http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/archive/index.php/t-1949.html;
Raymond Challinor, `The Origins of British Bolshevism’ (p266-267); `Hidden heroes: Going from the green to the red” by Charlie McGuire, April 2006 in:
http://www.scottishsocialistvoice.net/back%20issues%2006/issue%20261.htm
Andy McMahon
Born on March 18th 1920, he left school at 14 and was apprenticed as a carpenter at Fairfields shipyards. Joined YCL in his teens and then, in the 1940s, the Communist Party, in which he remained for the best part of two decades. He was in the Merchant Navy on the Murmansk runs during World War II and retained an admiration for the Soviet people arising from this.
He was a shop steward after the war but was sacked and blacklisted in the late 1950s. Emigrating to Canada and then the USA, he found himself deported as an `undesirable alien’. After he returned to Scotland, he gravitated to the Labour Party and became a councillor in Fairfields ward from 1973. A stalwart of the `Glasgow Wheelers’’ cycling club, he became the Labour MP for Glasgow Govan from 1979-83. McMahon died on April 26th 2005.
Guardian May 20th 2005
Joan McMichael
Dr Joan McMichael (later Joan MacMichael-Askins) was born on February 8th 1906 in India, as Joan Catherine MacPherson in a tent in Gudrunwala in the Punjab; indeed, she was delivered by her own father, who was to become the Inspector General in the police of the Indian Raj. Much to her disapproval, he was to, several times, arrest Mahatma Ghandi.
In the early 1920s, she went to Edinburgh University, being one of the first women medical students to study there. In spite of having had no science training previously at all, she graduated as a doctor in 1929. Like many of her contemporaries, she became aware of politics in the 1926 general strike, having treated strikers who had been physically assaulted by police and this contributed to radicalising her views enormously.
Some years later, she joined the Labour Party and then the Communist Party in 1936, remaining a staunch, even leading, Communist for the rest of her life. During the Spanish Civil War, she was involved in Medical Aid for Spain and then went on the support Medical Aid for China. Her increasing interest and involvement in politics led to the breakdown of her first marriage to a fellow student, John McMichael, later Sir John, and also the father of her first two sons, from whom she was very sad to be parted.
At the beginning of the Second World War, she worked for the blood transfusion service in Slough. Later, she became Medical Officer for Health in West London, where was noted for her dedication to occupational health. Joan served on a Ministry of Supply advisory committee. She married Bill Carritt (see separate entry), with whom she had two children, a girl and a boy.
A member of the Party’s Executive Committee for a time, Dr Joan McMichael was an early champion of children’s and workers’ health rights and was instrumental in carrying out Britain’s first industrial mass X-ray screening for tuberculosis. After the war, she became Medical Officer for Health for London County Council, working especially with children with disabilities in the Fulham and Hammersmith areas, a field in which she remained involved well into the 1970s, writing a book on the subject.
Joan McMichael was a leader of the post-war squatters’ movement, which enabled families living in appalling conditions to move in and occupy empty luxury dwellings. She was particularly active in the struggle at Fountain Court, just off Buckingham Palace Road, where homeless families moved into unoccupied flats. In 1947, she was elected one of three Communist councillors to Westminster Borough Council, where a particular interest of hers was in fighting for better housing and conditions for working people.
She was even better known for using her medical skills, setting up Medical Aid for Vietnam in 1965, following a visit to the World Congress of Women in Moscow 1963, as chair of a group of some fifty women delegates from Britain. She had listen, spellbound, to accounts of horrifying terror and torture that the Vietnamese people were enduring. This so moved her that she dedicated the remaining 24 years of her life to the cause of peace in Vietnam. She became close friends of the head of a hospital in Hanoi, the director of the Vietnamese Institute for Medical Research and the Minister of Health. Twice, she was able to hold discussions with Ho Chi-Minh on what the medical needs of the country were and how supporters in Britain could help.
Joan’s expertise on medical problems in developing countries, aided by her experience in Vietnam, led to her writing a book on solutions to health issues in such countries. Her energy was, however, mostly devoted to Medical Aid to Vietnam, which she indisputedly led. Some £2.5 million was raised to send penicillin, anti-malarials and other drugs; even blood donated in Britain was reduced to serum and transported across the world by MAV. Towards the end of the war, Joan poured her efforts into raising funds for a completely refurbished and re-equipped hospital in Vietnam.
This dedication was recognised by the Vietnamese government in 1980, when it awarded her the Order of Friendship. Late in life, she married Jack Askins (see separate entry), a fellow Communist campaigner for the Vietnamese people, who died two years before Joan, who herself died aged 83 on August 6th 1989
Sources: Morning Star (n.d.), Guardian August 16th 1989, and other sources
Nan McMillan
A teacher and union activist, Nan McMillan was born in 1906 the sixth of 12 children in a working class family in Bermondsey, south London. Exceptionally talented, she won a Junior County Scholarship to St Saviour's and St Olave's Girls Grammar School. Political activity began in her teens when she campaigned for the return to parliament of Dr. Salter.
She was persuaded to borrow £20, then a considerable sum, from her secondary school’s fund to equip herself for teacher training college and was eventually to repay the debt from winnings in an international essay competition. She trained as a teacher at Furzedown College in London and, on graduation in 1926, she was offered a secondary school post, specialising in English. In 1927, she met David Capper, CPGB founding member, a lecturer who had just led a delegation to the fledgling Soviet Union. They met at a Labour League for Youth dance and began living together. The bar on woman teachers marrying would have meant her not only giving up her job but also her certificate of teaching, neither of which she would countenance. At a time when co-habitation was strongly frowned upon, she and David did exactly that; although Nan told her mother that they had married in secret. Fortunately, her headteacher was supportive of Nan and covered for her. When the bar on employing married women was lifted in 1947, Nan and David married, it was now too late to have children.
At the age of 23, she was a delegate to the national conference of the National Union of Teachers but then joined the National Union of Women Teachers in protest at its acceptance of unequal pay in the profession. She was to become NUWT’s President in 1940 and was the first Chairperson of the London Women's Parliament during the war. She rejoined the NUT in 1955, when it accepted equal pay and was President of Camberwell NUT in the 1950s. In 1952, she was appointed to her first headship. In 1963, became President of London Teachers’ Association and was a delegate over many years to NUT annual conferences. At the age of 59, Nan was appointed Head of the large and ethnically diverse Sarah Siddons Comprehensive School for girls in Westminster and spent six years there before retiring in 1971.
Nan retired from teaching in 1971 and moved to Dorset when David Capper died in 1974. She joined the local District Committee of the Communist Party and, during her long retirement, was involved in the Dorset Against the Cuts Campaign, CND, the Christchurch and District Women's Group and her local Pensioners Group. Her energetic campaigning on a range of local and national issues attracted the attention of the local press, which ran articles on her life under headlines such as 'Still campaigning at the age of 83' and 'Former head teacher who lived in sin!' She was also sought out for television programmes such as 'School Rules' and '20/20 Vision's History of Education'. Nan died at the age of 96 in 2002.
Sources: Bournemouth Evening Echo, ? 20th 1995; Education for Tomorrow Autumn 2002 No75
Rab McNulty
Born in Oatlands, Glasgow on July 1st 1938, McNulty began an apprenticeship as a compositor at age of 15. He joined the Communist Party at an early age. Having moved to Oxford in 1969 to work in printing, he became Father-Of-the-Chapel at Aldens Press. He was active on Oxford Trades Council in 1970s and in the anti-racist movement; during this period, he was arrested on the picket line during a Trust House Forte recognition dispute.
McNulty went to Ruskin College and then Sussex University as a mature student. Becoming a Researcher for the TASS (Technical and Supervisory) Section of the AUEW (later an independent union), he notably produced important policy documents on defence diversification. In early retirement, he became the UK representative in a European diversification project. Rab McNulty died at age of 62 on May 6th 2001.
Guardian 2nd July 2001
Kinsman McQueen
A full time paid `Daily Worker’ canvasser and sales organiser for Scotland in the mid-late 1930s. (The other full time Daily Worker canvassers were Bill Louden and Ernie Benson for England and Dai Maggs part-time agent in Wales.) So successful were the sales of the paper in Scotland, a Scottish edition of the Daily Worker, printed locally, was started in November 1940 and was sustained for some years with a circulation of 12-14,000.
Source: [Ernie Benson] Michael Walker
Harry McShane
A shipyard engineer, McShane became John Maclean’s lieutenant and was jailed three times for his part in the Clydeside strike movement of the First World War. He was with Willie Gallagher when tanks and troops charged strikers in George Square on January 31st 1919. Joining the Communist Party in July 1922, he worked alongside Wal Hannington in the unemployed workers’ movement. A reporter on the Daily Worker’s short-lived Scottish edition, he became the paper’s Scottish correspondent from 1943 until he resigned from the Communist Party in 1953. It was the adoption of the British Road to Socialism in 1951 that eventually prompted this move. McShane could not accept the concept of parliamentary struggle.
Although an early critic of the Stalin cult and a defender of Trotsky, McShane did not join any grouping and remained a Marxist. A maverick by nature, the title of his autobiography summed up what most thought of him: “No Mean Fighter”. In 1985, the city council gave him the freedom of the city and he remained active in Glasgow’s trades council until the year before he died aged 97.
Morning Star 15th April 1988
Bill Megarry
Born on July 19th 1908, in Northern Ireland, Megarry arrived in London in 1933 and fairly shortly afterwards joined the Communist Party. He was prominent in the Kino group of left-wing film makers, making a meagre living by touring Britain with radical films for public meetings. Kino was especially active in aid to Spain activities. He became an outstanding film editor, especially of documentaries.
In 1939, he joined the ambulance service, working through the blitz. In 1941, he returned to full-time film making as an editor with the Soviet Film Agency, where he worked with Ivor Montague.
After the war he worked on short government information films and then moved into more mainstream work. He was a life-long member and for a time elected shop steward of the film union ACTT, later merged into BECTU. Megarry left the Communist Party in the 1950s and died on July 19th 1998 aged 90.
Guardian 13th August 1998
Eddy Menzies
One of the first members of the Communist Party of Ireland, Menzies joined the Revolutionary Workers Groups in the early 1930s and was involved in the Outdoor Relief struggle. He was prominent as a leader of the squatters’ movement in Northern Ireland after the war.
An enthusiastic supporter of the Daily Worker, he delivered 100 copies a day by carrier bicycle to the Shorts aircraft factory in Belfast from the small newsagents’ shop he set up with compensation money from a factory accident.
His daughter, Edwina, one of five daughters he and his wife Sadie Newell, from Newtownards, had married Jimmy Stewart, General Secretary for a long time of the Communist Party of Ireland. Menzies died aged 82 in 1993.
Morning Star February 13th 1993
Allan Leslie Merson
Allan Merson was born on August 26th 1916 in Northumberland, the son of a garage proprietor. He was a brilliantly successful pupil at Newcastle Royal Grammar School. In 1934, he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read history, where he met his lifelong friend, Christopher Hill, four years his elder. Impelled in part by the war in Spain, he joined the Communist Party and remained committed to this for the rest of his life.
After graduation, he went on a scholarship as an English assistant in a German school in Würzburg just as the Nazis were taking over Austria. On his return, for a while, he was a civil servant and then served during the Second World War in military intelligence, spending two and a half years in Iceland. Here, he edited a forces’ newspaper and was in contact with Icelandic Communists and deeply involved in the British Communist organisation in the military. He later served in France, Belgium and Germany ending up as press officer for the British occupation administration in North Rhine Westphalia and also Berlin. He was demobilised as a major and married an Icelander at this time, later remarrying for a second time to Betty, who was a long-standing activist in CND.
In 1946, he was appointed a history lecturer at the University College of Southampton, where he remained until early retirement due to ill-health in 1977. He edited three volumes of the `Third Book of Remembrance of Southampton (1514-89) between 1952 and 1965 and attained acknowledgement as an expert on the English Revolution of the 17th century.
Merson wrote widely on history for Party journals; he was an especially devoted member of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party and produced several `Our History’ pamphlets. These included `Town Privileges and Politics in Tudor and Stuart England’ (1958), `Problems of the German Anti-Fascist Resistance 1933-1945’ (1966) and `The Nazis and Monopoly Capital’ (1973). A book published in the mainstream, `Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany’ (1985) was a scholarly yet politically committed work. Printed also in German in Germany, it is widely regarded as the best study of the subject to date.
A Marxist education tutor for the Party, member of the Hampshire and Dorset District Committee, he was a fully involved member of the Southampton branch throughout the post-war period and was a committed member of the re-established Communist Party of Britain when he died, aged 79, on October 28th 1995.
Morning Star November 3rd 1995; Guardian December 1st 1995
David Michaelson
David Michaelson was born in Edinburgh in 1912, but came to London in his teens. There, he took up employment in the engineering industry and joined the Communist Party. He was Amalgamated Engineering union (AEU) shop stewards' convenor at the Lagonda Works, Staines, which was engaged on munitions work during the Second World War. At this time he became a member of the Engineering and Chairman of the National Shop Stewards National Council, contributing to its official organ, The New Propellor (later re-titled The Metal Worker).
Michaelson was also Vice President of Hendon Trades Council. An activist in the forefront of the shop stewards' movement, Michaelson became editor of The Metal Worker in 1953, remaining in that capacity until it ceased publication in 1963. Michaelson lived in Hendon, North West London and stood for Parliament as the Communist candidate for West Willesden in 1950 securing 938 votes. Michaelson was the author of numerous short stories and poems, leaving many unfinished drafts at his death in 1975; his papers are in the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University.
Michael Walker
Jeff Mildwater
G "Jeff" Mildwater was born in 1915; a bricklayer by trade, he joined the Communist party in 1931. Mildwater was involved with the Stepney Workers Circle and fought in the International Brigade in Spain, leaving England on 31st April 1937 and arriving in Paris in time for May Day: "It was a wonderful sight.... 25 deep and taking over 3 hours to pass.....and you should hear them sing a strange contrast from London."
He rose to the rank of Lieutenant: "The uniform of the International Brigade is the "open sesame" anywhere and the clenched fist and "Salud camarade is the greeting we get where ever we go". He also wrote of the pride he had in the International Brigade: "It gives one a well developed chest to march in parades with the French, German, Austrian, Polish, English - sections all singing the revolutionary songs in their own language. As far as the civil population here is concerned - there is nothing they will not do for the Brigade."
Mildwater was wounded at the Aragon offensive in October 1937. He was Second-in-Command during the battle of the Anti Tank Battery, but his main complaint in Spain was his inability to get secure copies of the Daily Worker.
He stood as the Communist Party Parliamentary Candidate in the 1950 General Election for Bethnal Green, one of nine International Brigadiers to fight for the Communist party in the 1950 election. (The full list was: Peter Kerrigan, Bob Cooney, Don Renton, Bill Alexander, John Mahon, Jeff Mildwater, Jack Coward, Wogan Phillips and Bert Ramelson.)
Michael Walker
Geoff Miles
Miles died, aged 84, having served for 35 years as a Communist councillor for Torfaen, Gwent, South Wales
MW
Alec Miller
Born in Stepney, in the east end of London, Miller trained to be a signwriter, a trade that enabled him to design and produce many posters and banners. He joined the Young Communist League at 14 years of age and went on to organise the biggest ever YCL branch at Stepney, with some 250 members.
He played a prominent role in the struggles of the unemployed, took par in the Battle of Cable Street and worked for solidarity with Spain. During the war, he organised `Bevin Boys’, those who were conscripted into labour rather than the forces.
Miller became London YCL District Secretary after the war and was the Treasurer of the London Communist Party for many years. During this period, he began organising tours to socialist countries for the Party, before branching out on his own account into tourism; this became Progressive Tours.
He had wide interests, witnessed by his organisation of the Challenge Jazz Club, the Challenge Film Club (`Challenge’ was and is the name of the Young Communist League journal) and the Socialist Youth Camp in the New Forest. He was expelled by the revisionist leadership of the CPGB during the internal struggles of the 1980s but never accepted this as valid, remaining Chair of the Sydenham branch until his death in 1986.
Morning Star 17th December 1986
Jimmy Milne
Born in 1921, Milne joined the Communist Party in 1939. He was a patternmaker by trade and first worked at the Hall Russell shipyard. The secretary of Aberdeen Trades Council from 1948-1969, he made his mark by working for safer working conditions for fishing trawler crew. But his interests and activities were always very wide; he was a member of the Regional Hospital Board, where he kept up a constant pressure for reforms in the interests of patients.
He became a member of the General Council of the Scottish TUC in 1954, the youngest person elected to that time. Deputy General Secretary in 1969 and the General Secretary in 1975, Milne was also a member of the Communist Party Executive Committee for a period and the Scottish Committee until his death.
During his period of office, the STUC was heavily involved in a range of activities of an educational and cultural nature. He spent six years as Chair of SCOTBEC and, with the Glasgow Trades Council, a residential college was established at Treesbank. Jimmy Milne spent 12 years on the board of Govan Shipbuilders and was the longest serving member of the Parole Board when he stepped down, after 15 years membership.
Married to Alice, Jimmy Milne was also a great music lover, who consciously spread the STUC’s influence widely in education and the arts and received an honorary doctorate from Heriot Watt University for such work. The Scottish National Orchestra performed a specially commissioned overture, `Sunset Song’, by William Sweeney on his retirement in a similar gesture. He died in 1986, only ten days before his official retirement date. Over a thousand people attended his funeral, including the then Scottish Secretary of State, Donald Dewar, and many other prominent individuals from all walks of life.
Morning Star 19th April 1986 and [n.d.]; Scottish Trade Union Review No. 30, January-March 1986
Robert Milton
Milton was born (possibly) on 28th June 1917, in Brodick, Arran. A member of the Union of Postal Workers and the YCL, he served in the International Brigade in Spain and was repatriated 1938.
Source: Frank Ward
Mick Mindel
A Yiddish speaker, Mindel was born on December 24th 1909, off Commercial Road in London’s east end, the son of Lithuanian immigrants from whom he gained an early political education. His father, Morris Mindel, was the leader of the London Workers’ Circle, a branch of the Jewish socialist current known as Bundism. Mick Mindel in old age would recount how, as a child, he had met Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman; he also recall seeing boatloads of Jews migrating back to revolutionary Russia from London’s ports in 1917 to take part in the momentous events then unfolding.
Mick finished off his education at the Jewish Free School and he joined the Communist Party in 1929. Once a boy cricketer for the Middlesex reserves, he played football for the Young Communist League XI. On a 1933 tour of Germany, the team has fixtures against a variety of German Communists, he observed close hand the torchlight processions celebrating Hitler’s election win.
A cutter making womenswear, Mindel rapidly rose in the United Ladies Tailors Trade Union, effectively a Jewish union with a rule book in both English and Yiddish. Aged 29, he became the Chair of the union in 1938, becoming a main spokesman for Anglo-Jewish working class. David Ben-Gurion called on him to unsuccessfully ask that he lead a migration of Jews to Palestine.
Negotiating entry in the Tailor and Garment Workers Union of his own body, Mindel served from the war period as an executive member and the senior London officer and secretary of the London West End Fashion Trade branch. His membership of the Communist Party was certainly a restraint on his further progress in the union, from which he retired in 1975. The events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, however, tested his loyalty and in old age he began to develop affection for Israel, whilst maintaining a reserve of militancy. He continued to serve his union on the relevant wages council for some time and also applied his earlier experience of organising immigrants to a new generation and ethnicity of garment workers. Mindel died on May 1st 1994, aged 84.
Guardian 7th May 1994
Abe, Alex and Dave Moffat
(Note: unusually, the entries for these brothers are combined, for reasons that will be evident upon reading the text! Although the entry is somewhat skewed towards Abe, the more famous of them. The main source is Abe’s biography, which – though generous to his brother Alex, who served the Communist Party and the miners with distinction– understandably focuses upon his own life. Sadly, there is little detail about David Moffat to draw upon.)
Abe Moffat was born in Lumphinnans on 24th September 1896. He and his brothers, notably Alex, who was seven years younger than Abe, and Dave, were remarkable leaders of the Scottish miners and life-long Communists. Their village became known as a `Little Moscow’, one of several pit villages that became dominated by the Communist Party. They came from a strong tradition of mining unionism; their grandfather had been a pioneer of mining trades unionism in the Lothians during the 1860s but had been forced to move to Fife due to victimisation.
Abe Moffat worked in the pits from 1910 until he was victimised in 1926 and was active in all the miners’ strike actions from the moment he joined the industry. By late 1922, or early 1923, he had joined the Communist Party. He was involved in the publication of the `Buzzer’, a bulletin for militant miners at the Glencraig Colliery, Lochgelly. This was a Communist Party publication, produced on a typewriter and duplicator and costing 1d.
Within two years of joining the Party he was elected as a Communist councillor on Ballingry Parish Council. Parish councils had up to then proved to be a useful form of entry by Communists into the elective arena where the main challenger was Labour, by virtue of their small sized and concentrated electorates. They were abolished as a form of local government in 1929.
But Communism's roots were to grow even deeper in Fife, largely as a result of the role of Party members in the mining industry. The Scottish miners’ unions, which were county based, were largely in the hands of Labour’s right wing but such a leadership was severely challenged by the Left. The Labour-led executive of the Fife miners’ union refused to support the popularly supported strikes between 1919 and 1921 and, a 'Reform Union' had been formed in 1923. This was not largely a consequence of action by Communists but arose from a personality conflict between senior officials of the union. In 1926, Fife miners held out longer than the rest of Britain. The split was overcome during the General Strike and the nine months lockout of miners and a reunified union emerged in 1927. But continued tensions arising from bureaucratic repression of Left forces and the manoeuvring of the right led to a split.
In the new atmosphere of organisational unity, an exhaustive round of elections, which had not taken place in Fife since 1925, saw a massive swing to the Left. Now, the Fife union was massively in arrears in its affiliation fees to the Scottish federation, largely due to the organisation chaos that has ensued over the previous period. This was used as an excuse to delay the convening of the federation conference and the now de-selected officials continued to hold office in the county. Amidst the obvious reaction from the Left to this manoeuvring, the Scottish federation in the meantime changed the rules so as to expel the Fife county union from membership and thus disenfranchise the Communist-led winners of the election. The right wing in Fife then promptly declared a new union had been formed (the Fife, Kinross and Clackmannan Miners’ Association, to give it its correct title – FKCMA). This was accepted as an affiliate of the Scottish federation - the National Union of Scottish Miners.
Perhaps with hindsight wrongly, a minority but a significant number of miners in Fife accepted this as de-facto expulsion from a tarnished union. In mid-1929, Communists led the setting up a new union, the United Mineworkers of Scotland. Whilst there were UMS members elsewhere in Scotland, in Shotts in Lanarkshire for example, it was based mainly in Fife. Just before the formation of the UMS both Alex and Abe were elected checkweighmen at the No XI pit in Lumphinnans (a position of some importance to miners since it encompassed a legal role in overseeing the amount of cal cut and hence the value of earnings).
This sequence of events is rarely referred to by critics of the decision to form the UMS. Perhaps it was, in retrospect, something of a mistake but participants at the time felt that legitimacy was on their side and it did not feel wrong. Contrary to much academic and ultra-leftist criticism, the creation of the UMS was not a reflection of the left-turn in the Comintern from 1929 but an organic reaction to local circumstances. In short, the UMS was a reaction to election fraud, exacerbated by the unhealed frictions over attitudes to taking strike action.
Abe Moffat was not, again contrary to some academic persuasions, a key force in the creation of the UMS. He was, at the time of its foundation, a pit delegate - an important but not leading position; however, he was UMS secretary from 1931 to 1935 and, given the importance of this role, unsurprisingly was a delegate to the 7th Comintern Congress in 1935. His leadership of the UMS was primarily devoted to finding a way to achieve organisational unity amongst miners once again. In 1933 attempts to merge with the official union were rebuffed and, in 1935, with some support from the national miners’ federation and arising from a proposition by Abe Moffat himself, UMS members balloted to apply for membership of the official Fife union, to maximise the possibilities for unity. Despite this, both Alex and Abe were victimised from working in the pits.
In 1938, Abe Moffat, who had been Willie Gallagher’s agent in between elections, was himself elected a County Councillor, beating his Labour opponent by two to one and making the Communist Group of councillors five strong. He remained unbeaten as a councillor until 1944, when he left public elective office to become a full-time official for the miners’ union. His brother, Alex Moffat also became an elected Communist Fife County Councillor, serving for 19 years in a seat that was held by the Party for 40 years!
In 1938, with the discreet connivance of a full-time union official, both Alex and Abe were able to obtain work at a small private mine, not part of the county owners’ association, largely due to their reputation for hard work. Fortunately, the union was then structured on localities not pits, so, in 1939, Abe Moffat was elected delegate for Lumphinnans, amicably replacing another brother, David, who had kept the seat warm for him! The following year he was elected to the EC of the Scottish miners’ federation.
Abe Moffat
He was elected President of the Scottish miners in 1942, with 32,000 votes to 19,700 for his challenger and then proceeded to lead the campaign for a single Scottish miners’ union to be created out of the county associations. After the formation of the National Union of Miners (NUM) in 1944, across the whole of Britain, he was elected the Scottish President with a three to one vote, a position he held with considerable distinction until his retirement in September 1961. By that time, he served on the Scottish Communist Party District Committee for at least 25 years and the Party’s national Executive Committee for 30 years.
Source: Abe Moffat `My life with the miners’ (1965)
Dora Montefiore
Dora Montefiore, born in 1851, was a woman of many identities - suffragist, feminist, socialist and communist. She was a founder of the British Communist Party in 1920.
One of the London WSPU's founders she had achieved notoriety in the 1890s, fore by urging civil disobedience by means of a tax strike. In 1906, Montefiore, a woman of independent means and mind, actually did herself refuse to pay her taxes on the basis that "taxation without representation is tyranny". Her house was besieged for six weeks by bailiffs waiting to get out furniture valued to the amount of tax she owed.
Unlike many WSPU activists, she was a committed Marxist. In October 1913, two months into the massive Dublin lock-out, she obtained the agreement of Jim Larkin that the starving children of the city should be evacuated to be looked after by the British labour movement for the duration of the hostilities. Soon she had offers of 350 places for children, and more were coming all the time. Labour movement bodies, trade union branches and trades councils, offered to take the responsibility for one or more children. So did sections of the suffragettes.
They were given a room at Liberty Hall, the Transport Union HQ, and a meeting of wives of strikers was called. These mothers of hungry children eagerly grasped at this offer of help. The Catholic Church `discovered’ that this was a plot to convert children into Protestants and spread the whisper that Montefiore was really an agent of the White Slave Trade, who would sell the children to foreign brothels! Scenes of intimidation were seen at the station and the quay. Dora Montefiore was charged with kidnapping, although bailed and the charges were later dropped.
Dora Montefiore
Dora Montefiore, was heavily involved in the international socialist women’s movement and was a close communicating confidante of Alexandra Kollontai, the celebrated Russian revolutionary. A British Socialist Party executive member, Montefiore was enthusiastic about the creation of the Communist Party out of a range of socialist groups. Despite her then advanced age - she was then 70 years old - she was elected as the first woman on the executive committee of the Communist Party at the 1920 convention to form the party. She died in 1933.
Bill Moore
Born on 6th March 1911 in Scunthorpe, but his mother died when he was two weeks old and his paternal grandmother in Attercliffe, Sheffield brought him up. His father was killed in action in May 1917 outside Ypres. Moore won a free scholarship to grammar school in 1922, the first boy from Attercliffe to do so. In 1930, he won a scholarship to read history at Oriel College, Oxford. An athlete at university, he was out of work in the depression, after vainly seeking work as a history teacher.
At Oxford, he voted in 1933 for the Student Union resolution 'not to fight for king and country' and worked for the Peace Ballot in Sheffield in early 1935. In the autumn of 1935, he joined the Communist Party and was allocated duties with the Party group at Sheffield University. Became secretary of local Peace Council from January 1936.
Married by 1937, his father-in-law, who was fuel manager at Firth Browns, got him a job in the Engineers' Tool Department, as assistant to the commercial manager. Called up in October 1940, he served five and a half years in the army, first at Catterick in the Royal Armoured Corps, teaching driving and maintenance of tanks. After Russia was attacked, he took a commission.
Returning from the war in 1946, he began work as a teacher, winning 729 votes in a local election centred on the area around his school, Neepsend, in May 1950. He began full time work for the Yorkshire District in 1952, when his wife, Francis, resumed her career as a teacher. Moore was West Yorkshire Secretary for 3 years, followed by Yorkshire District Organiser for 11 years. Looked after district bookshop. Retired in 1976. Chairman of CPGB History Group 1984-1991.
Bill Moore – 90th Birthday celebrations brochure March 2001
John and Mary Morgan
Mary Morgan (née Lucas), the sister of Alice Cousins (see separate entry for Alice Cousins), was married to John Morgan, who was the librarian at Marx House before the Second World War. He subsequently worked for a period at the Party’s centre at King Street.
Source: Elsie Oliver
Marguerite Morgan
Marguerite Morgan (formerly Green, nee Renard) was born in Streatham, London in 1915 and died in Tywyn, Wales in 2001. Marguerite grew up in London. She went to a convent school where she was a close friend of Joan Littlewood (of Theatre Workshop fame). While at the school they both formed a ‘clandestine Bolshevik cell’ as an expression of adolescent rebellion and an early commitment to left-wing ideas. She left school with only the Matric (O-level equivalent) and, after completing a secretarial course, took various secretarial jobs. In the meantime the Spanish Civil War had broken out and she became passionately involved in the support movement for Republican Spain and also joined the Communist Party.
One secretarial job she had just before the outbreak of the Second World War was with British Aluminium at a factory near Banbury, but this was very short lived. She was sacked after only a few days by a reluctant manager who confessed he’d been contacted by MI5 and told to sack her (the company worked on military contracts).
She then decided to change career and become a nurse. During her traineeship and while living in hospital accommodation, the matron saw that she had a picture of Stalin on her wall and, once more, she was summarily sacked. She moved to Coventry where she met her first husband, Norman Green, before being evacuated to Madeley in Shropshire, after their house had been flattened by a Nazi bomb, and where they both became active in building the Party there, working for broad-based action and co-operation with the Labour Party, other progressives and even the local church. She was so respected, that the local vicar actually asked her if she would be willing to take Sunday school for the local children - as a convinced atheist, she politely declined.
On returning to Coventry and having three children, she decided to go to college as a mature student and become a t