Graham Stevenson

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 teacher. Her first teaching appointment after completing her training was at Stoke Secondary Modern School for girls. Before her arrival there, the headmistress had all the staff together and warned them that ‘a Communist was arriving to join the staff and they should beware her influence’!

At the school, her diligence and commitment as a teacher was soon widely recognised. Her support for the girls, encouraging them to have faith in their own abilities and to reject the widely accepted cliché that pupils at Secondary Modern schools were ‘failures and not brainy’ produced results. She managed to get a number of them through O levels as well as `A' levels and several went on to university -unheard of achievements for Secondary Modern kids in those days.

In Coventry she was active in the Party at branch, city and district levels, serving on the West Midlands district committee for some years. She was a co-initiator of, and activist in, the Coventry Peace Committee, working closely with CND and other local peace activists and was later involved in setting up the Coventry Council for Reconciliation which, with church involvement, became a significant force in promoting peace internationally. Coventry went on to set up twinning links with other bombed cities of Eastern Europe like Lidice, Stalingrad and Dresden.

After two decades teaching in Coventry, she took part in a summer course in the GDR for teachers of English and was asked if she’d like to move to the GDR on a more permanent basis to teach English there to student teachers. She agreed and moved to the GDR in 1965. While out there she met her second husband-to-be, Dave Morgan, a party comrade from Bristol. Both spent over twenty years in the GDR, where they not only taught but also were politically active in the small party group of British ex-patriates and in the GDR’s own Communist Party, the SED.

Shortly after the collapse of the GDR, with the triumphalism of the West and a successive demolition of all the GDR’s achievements, they decided in 1990 to return to Britain. Now both retired in terms of salaried work, neither retired though from political work. The remained active in the CPB, selling and promoting the Morning Star and working locally and nationally for the advance of socialism.

After undergoing a heart operation in 2000, she suffered a stroke and was in a nursing home until she died on May 9th 2001. Her partner, Dave Morgan, pre-deceased her by one year.

She wrote an autobiography, detailing her life and political work, titled "Part of the Main; life of a Communist Woman" and published by People’s Publications in Britain in 1990.

John Green

R Morrison

Born in 1913, Morrison was a miner in the Kent coalfield. He served in the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War. After the war, he became a student at Ruskin College Oxford. In the 1950 general election, he stood as the Communist Party’s parliamentary candidate for Dover.

A L Morton

(Arthur) Leslie Morton was born on July 4th 1903 at Bury St Edmunds into a farming family. From 1921, he studied at the University of Cambridge, where he was one of the group that formed around Maurice Dobb (see separate entry for Dobb.) Morton joined the Communist Party in 1929 and remained a member all of his life, along with his wife, Vivien, the daughter of T A Jackson (see spearate entry for Jackson).
A teacher for a time at A. S. Neill's school Summerhill, he was one of a group of London left-wing intellectuals of the 1930s. His friends at that time included Albert. L. Lloyd and Maurice Cornforth (see separate entries); he assisted Victor B. Neuberg. In 1932 and 1933 he was involved in a debate with F. R. Leavis, in the pages of `Scrutiny’.
He took part in the Hunger Marches of 1934 and was the Daily Worker correspondent for the East Anglia contingent, alsoserving on the editorial board of the paper in this period. He acted as the `owner’ of the paper at a time when personal libaility applied in libel cases, threatening jail since the paper had no money!

A.L Morton
Morton was a prolific English Marxist historian. His 1938 `A People's History Of England, published by the Left Book Club, was adopted quasi-officially as the Communist Party’s national history, and went through later editions on that basis. For a time during the early part of the Second World War, he was the full-time district organiser of the Party’s East Anglia district and was chair of the district committee for many years.
Morton worked mostly as an independent scholar; for a time in the 1940s he was closely associated with the Historians Group of the Communist Party. He is known also for work on William Blake and the Ranters, and for the study `The English Utopia’. Morton was one of the group of leading communist historians invited to Moscow in 1954/5, with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and the Byzantine historian Robert Browning.
Morton took part in the Peoples’ March for Jobs in the 1980s and died in 1987 at his home, The Old Chapel Clare, in Suffolk at the age of 84.
Publications:
`A People's History Of England’ (1938)
`Language of Men’ (1945) essays
`The story of the English revolution’ (1949) Communist Party pamphlet
`The English Utopia’ (1952)
`The British Labour Movement’ 1770-1920 (1956) with George Tate
`The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake’ (1958)
`The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen’ (1962)
`The matter of Britain: essays in a living culture’ (1966)
`The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English `Revolution’ (1970)
`Political Writings of William Morris’ (1973) editor
`Freedom in Arms A selection of Leveller writings’ (1975) editor
`Collected poems’ (1976)
`Three Works By William Morris’ (1977) editor
`History and the Imagination: Selected Writings of A.L. Morton’ (1990) edited by Margot Heinemann and Willie Thompson

Morning Star 24th October 1987; 26th October 1987

Max Morton

A farmer who lived with his wife Dorothy, also an active Communist. East Anglian District Communist schools were held at their farm house with Maurice Batters, Jean Deaken and the famous Isobel Brown in attendance in the late 1940s. Max Morton was elected as a Communist councillor to Pentlow parish Council in the early 1960s and wrote regularly for the Communist journal the Country Standard.

Michael Walker

Declan Mulholland

Born December 1932 and brought up in the Falls Road area of Belfast, Mulholland encountered poverty in childhood. At one stage, the family could not afford fees for school but, since he was a bright child, his headmaster allowed him to stay on until the debt could be caught up with. At the age of 15, he went to work in Belfast’s shipyards, where he became politicised.

In the early 1950s, he came to England as a delegate for a peace movement conference. Subsequently, he moved to London permanently and joined the Young Communist League. Having obtained work at Pinewood studios, building film sets, he then found his way to Unity Theatre, where he designed sets and soon found himself acting. He kept a close affinity to Unity; when the theatre burned down in 1975, he chaired the body that kept the spirit of Unity alive by staging occasional performances.

In the late 1970s, he drifted from the Communist Party into the anarchist movement. He was a close friend of Peter O’Toole and appeared for many years in the RSC in comedy roles and in numerous television performances and died on June 29th 1999

Guardian 27th July 1999

James Mullins

Jack Mullins was a Communist Party member from the 1930s and a miner for 50 years. He worked in South Yorkshire, although he was blacklisted many times. Mullins died aged 85 in 1995 in Mexborough.

Morning Star 1st April 1995

Harry Mundy

Born in London in 1913, Harry Mundy joined the Communist Party during the Second World War, whilst working for a telephone company. After the war, he settled in Hackney and played a major role in the party there. A pensioners’ activist in retirement, he was president of the Greater London Pensioners Association and died aged 82 in 1995.

Morning Star 7th December 1995

Ian Munro

Munro joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and was latterly a member of Govanhill branch, until joining Democratic Left on the dissolution of the CPGB. He was Scottish circulation representative for the Daily Worker and Morning Star for over 20 years and trade union representative for other circulation reps in the west of Scotland. He retired from the paper in 1969 and was a Scottish CND activist for decades. Munro died in 2001 aged 94.

Morning Star 5th January 2001

Sean Murray

Born in 1898, the son of a small farmer in Cushendall, Co. Antrim, Sean Murray’s grandfather had been a United Irishman in 1798. The three generations of his family spanned the most tumultuous years of Irish history, 1798, 1848, 1867, the Land League and 1916-23. Although showing signs of being a brilliant pupil at Glenaon National School, he had to leave it at the age of 14 years to work on his father's and uncle's farms. His teacher, "Master" McNamee, took a continuous interest in his education and introduced him to classical literature.

As a youth, Sean Murray became interested in the national and labour movements. He joined the IRA becoming Commandant of the Antrim Battalion, which engaged in attacks on police barracks. Whilst on his way to join a Flying Column, with his Adjutant Malcolm McKeegan, in 1920, he was arrested by the British forces and brought to Crumlin Road Jail, Belfast, and later transferred to the Curragh Internment Camp, from which he was released on the declaration of the Truce that preceded the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.

In December 1922 he met Peadar O'Donnell for the first time; thereafter they became close friends and comrades-in-arms on the Republican Anti-Treaty side in the Civil War. Afterwards he emigrated to Britain, working for a period in the London docks and becoming a delegate to the London Trades Council and then Secretary.

When he returned to Ireland, he was organiser of the "Irish Worker League" which had been formed in Ireland by "Big Jim" Larkin. In 1928-31 he was a student at the Lenin International School in Moscow; when he returned to Ireland, he became Organiser of the Irish Workers' Revolutionary Groups.

He was nearly burned alive when its headquarters, Connolly House at Great Strand Street. Dublin was set alight by a religious-incited mob in March 1933. At the foundation of the Communist Party of Ireland, in June of that year, he was elected General Secretary. In October, he was served with an expulsion order from the territory of Northern Ireland which he refused to recognise. He continued to make many secret journeys there but was eventually arrested and jailed.

Murray was General Secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland from 1933 to 1940 and was its National Organiser from then until his death at the age of 63 in 1961. A man of great intellect, he was an outstanding Marxist-Leninist scholar with the specific ability to apply his revolutionary knowledge to the Irish conditions. He was also a prolific journalist, editor and pamphleteer.

Sources: Morning Star 12th September 1994; Michael O’Riordan `The Connolly Column’

Helen Muspratt (Dunman)

Born in India of an army family, she was sent to school in Britain. On her father’s retirement in 1922, the family lived in Swanage in Dorset. Having got to know a group of artists who had settled nearby, the career of photographer was suggested to her. She took a photography course in Regent’s Street Polytechnic in London.

Her professional life as a photographer began at the age of 22 in a studio in Swanage. In 1932, she moved to Cambridge and set up a partnership with Lettice Ramsay, a young widow with society connections. Muspratt was the technician and Ramsay the business partner. The aim was to produce naturalistic, rather than posed images. Muspratt’s portraits of dancers and painters were striking and art deco in character. She was strongly influenced by the work of the American, Man Ray. There were many very well known sitters throughout her career, including the `Cambridge spies’.

Helen Muspratt in her youth - a self portrait

During a visit to the Soviet Union in 1936, Muspratt travelled down the Volga, photographing in documentary style as she went. On her return, she joined the Communist Party. The following year she took powerful images of unemployed miners on a tour of South Wales and married Jack Dunman, a fellow Communist. From hereon, she was the breadwinner and Jack the professional revolutionary. With Ramsay, she opened a second studio in Oxford. Whilst Muspratt continued to specialise in portraits, she also took wedding photos, continuing to use her name for professional purposes and for which she is retrospectively best known.

Whilst photography and politics only rarely meshed, she continued to be active in the Communist Party and in CND and Medical Aid for Vietnam. The Dunman’s home in Oxford was a place of considerable activity. Jack Dunman died in 1973 and Helen Muspratt Dunman both lived and retained the core of her beliefs long after.

Helen Muspratt Dunman

In 1976, Ramsay and Muspratt Dunman held a retrospective exhibition that did much to promote the reputation of the latter, who retired shortly afterwards. In 1986, she was featured in a documentary book on women photographers and her achievements were first widely and publicly recognised. Several television programmes touched on her work and she died on July 29th 2001, aged 89.

Guardian August 11th 2001

Margaret Mynatt

Mynatt was born in Vienna in 1907, the daughter of a British musician, John Charles Mynatt, (who was known professionally as Giovanni Carlo Minotti). She moved to Berlin in 1929, and joined the Communist Party, becoming involved with Bertolt Brecht and his circle. She assisted in the creation of `St Joan of the Stockyards’ and other plays. In 1933, Mynatt left Germany, in the wake of the anti-Communist repression following the Reichstag fire, and settled in London.

She was Head of Tribunals for the Czech Refugee Trust Fund, 1938-1941, and was dismissed (along with Yvonne Kapp – see her entry) by the Foreign Office in 1941. They subsequently jointly published `British Policy and the Refugees’, not published for decades afterwards.

Mynatt was Head of Reuters Soviet Monitor, 1951-1951; Manager of Central Books, 1951-1966 and a director of the publishers Lawrence and Wishart, 1966-1977. At the time of her death in February 1977, she was editor-in-chief of the `Collected Works of Marx and Engels’.

http://www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search2?coll_id=5889&inst_id=31

Len Nash

Nash spent three years in India as a serviceman during the war. On his return he became a supervisory foreman at the King’s Cross Goods Yard.

Whilst working there he received a cheque for five pounds five shillings from the Divisional Manager of British Railways for saving a man’s life in January 1965. Len pulled a colleague off the tracks to stop him being crushed by a railway carriage.

He became a union representative for the Union of Construction and Allied Trades and Technicians (UCATT). He then worked at the Town Hall in Judd Street, as a uniformed attendant “gold-braid” until 1988.

Len was a proud member of the Communist Party and was heavily involved in helping the pit-workers during the miners’ strikes of 1984/5. He helped to arrange meetings and put pressure on the unions to keep up their support during the strikes. His wife, Jean, said his proudest moment came in 1985 when he was made an honorary member of the National Union of Miners in Hatfield on January 1, 1985. Arthur Scargill signed his membership card. She said: “It was something he treasured right until the end.”

He met his wife Jean, a Yorkshire woman, during the miners’ strike. She was the chairwoman of the Miners Wives’ Support Group. They married in 1987 and moved back to her hometown Pontefract in 1988.

Tom Foot

http://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/061605/o061605_01.htm
Friday 17th June, 2005

Sid Nash

A life-long Communist, Nash was, for many decades, an activist in USDAW, the shop and distributive workers’ union, along with his wife, Dora and a particularly successful player at the union’s national policy-making conference. A Morning Star supporter of some note, he died aged 89 in 1991.

Morning Star 2nd February 1991

Reg Neal

A prominent member of the Hayes, West Middlesex Communist Party, R.P. (Reg) Neal was a popular local teacher at Yeading and secretary of the Hayes Left Book Club, which he established in October 1937. Neal was active in local Aid to Spain movement, based at the Hayes Labour Hall, he became the Chair of the local Labour Party in the late 1930s and was at the forefront of the campaign against war.

He joined the Communist Party just prior to the start of the Second World War and subsequently served in the Royal Air Force in North Africa, rising to the rank of Flying Officer. His prominent role in local campaigns, war record and good looks contributed to him being the most successful candidate of the borough in the local elections of 1946, missing a seat by less than 100 votes.

His appointment in October 1950 to the Headship of Bounds Green School, led to Conservative controlled Middlesex County Council refusing to endorse his appointment, and then imposing a blanket ban on the appointment of Communists or Fascists to Headships. This also affected fellow teacher and Communist G.C.T. Giles.

It is believed that Reg Neal later secured a headship in Sheffield. Michael Walker, who has supplied this entry, would welcome any further information. Contact him via the website address.

Michael Walker

John (JWT) Newbold

John Walton Turner Newbold was born in 1888. He became a socialist and was a historian. Newbold was briefly Britain's first formally elected Communist MP. He was swept to victory in a by-election in November 1922 for Motherwell, on the back of the Irish Catholic vote prevalent in the area. He sent a telegram to Lenin on winning: “Motherwell is won for Moscow and the Bolsheviks”. Thousands would attend his Sunday afternoon meetings to hear his parliamentary report. But he was to loose the seat in the election of 1923. Newbold resigned from the Party in 1924, and gradually drifted to the right of politics, some have even suggested that he was an agent for the British secret service. JWT Newbold died in 1943, after having become an academic historian.

Marjorie Negrea (nee Beasly)

Died on August 23rd 2002, aged 89, in hospital in Bucharest after a sudden illness. In earlier years she had been a civil servant at the Ministry of Health and a member of the NEC of the Civil Service Clerical Association. As a Communist and a minority member of the right-wing dominated NEC during the late 1940s and early 1950s, she suffered vicious political attacks. Later, Marjorie and her husband Steve (a Romanian) were well-known to as active members of the British/Romanian Friendship Society. They moved to Bucharest in the mid-1950s. Her husband died in 1998.

Morning Star 12th October 2002

Peter Nicholas

Born in Worcester in 1914, he began work at the age of fourteen at the Star Motor Company and gained skills as a universal grinder. In 1943, he became a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and, five years later, he became an employee of the Rover company. It is likely that he joined the Communist Party in this period.

In the same year, 1948, he secured election both as a shop steward and as an AEU convenor and became Secretary of the Joint Shop Stewards' Committee. A leading member of the Rover Combine Committee, he joined the British Leyland Trade Union Combine and became its treasurer on the acquisition of Rover by Leyland in 1967.

Peter Nicholas maintained a long-standing personal interest in the cause of disabled people.

Source: Warwick Modern Records Centre

T E Nicholas

T E Nicholas, poet, preacher, lecturer and dentist was born in Llanfyrnach, Pembrokeshire in 1878, and became a talented champion of Welsh language Communism. Known by his bardic name, Niclas y Glais, he was a prolific writer of poetry from 1900 to 1967. His English biographer, David W Howell of the University of Wales, Swansea, comments:

"T E Nicholas was one of the great 'characters' of twentieth-century Wales. From his boyhood days spent on the lovely Preseli hills of Pembrokeshire, down to the end of his life, he was a radical, a thorn in the flesh of the political and religious establishment, employing his considerable literary talents and oratorical gifts, expressed in his native Welsh tongue, in championing the downtrodden Welsh worker in both the industrial valleys of South Wales and the rural hamlets and villages of Cardiganshire and North Pembrokeshire.”

Around the turn of the century, he decided to pursue a vocation as a minister of religion and he received his three-year training for this at the Gwynfryn Academy, College Street, Ammanford. He served as a Minister at Glais between 1904 and 1914, when he gained a reputation for speaking up for society’s disadvantaged. Although he moved away from Ammanford after his days at Gwynfryn he continued to return to the area for the purpose of public speaking engagements, including visits to the 'White House', a centre for young radical coal miners from 1913 to 1922 and `preached’ (his sermons always contained a moral and political lesson) right across Wales.

T E Nicolas as a young man

He was a pacifist during the First World War and stood for the Independent Labour Party in the election of 1918 was a founder member of the Communist Party in 1920 and lectured tirelessly on the Soviet Union thereafter.

The Spanish Civil war, 1936-38 gave rise to his sonnets denouncing Fascism and these helped to rouse the sympathy of the Welsh people for the Spanish Republic. October 1938 saw him speak at a meeting in Glamorgan, chaired by the General Secretary of the South Wales miners, Dai Francis, commemorating the death of a south Wales miner who had been in the International Brigade. Back home in Aberystwyth, he wrote to Dai Francis enclosing a sonnet in memory of the 'Welsh Comrade' who fell in Spain and pledging that he would see to it that a memorial would later be set up for the gallant Welshmen who died in Spain. He was true to his word, for he - with others - organized a memorial tablet in the Stalingrad Hospital to the memory of those Welsh members of the International Brigade who fell in Spain.

His weekly articles to the Welsh newspaper 'Y Cymro' from 1937 impressed upon his readers the danger of a Second World War arising out of Fascist aggression and Britain's policy of appeasement. In 1939, in line with Communist Party policy, Nicholas expressed support for the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and his opposition to Britain’s entry into war against Germany. Nicholas then fell victim to the witch-hunt against not only pro-German sympathisers but those on the political left and Welsh nationalists. The Cardiganshire police picked him up at Llanbrynmair on 11 July 1940 on charges supposedly justified on a ridiculous allegation that he was a Nazi sympathiser, on account of his having at home a war map published in the Daily Express with German flags pinned on it simply to show the course of the war!

Nicholas spent four months in prison from the 11th July 1940 and his son, Thomas Islwyn Nicholas (1903 – 1980), was also imprisoned for the same period. Both were sent first to Swansea prison and later transferred to Brixton. While behind bars, he wrote some one hundred and fifty sonnets of profound humanity. A small incident would supply inspiration. Denied writing paper, he scribbled the sonnets on the slate in his cell and then wrote them out in ink on toilet paper, some of which were smuggled out of Swansea prison by a friendly prison officer. It was thanks to a protest raised by the Labour movement and the chapels on their behalf that both men were released early. On 22 June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union, bringing Nicholas and the Communist movement into a position of support for the war. The prison sonnets were later published to great acclaim.

T E Nicholas in old age

In his old age, Nicholas continued to contributed articles to the Welsh language press and wrote poetry and political articles supportive of socialism. Nicholas died in 1971 at the age of 91.

http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/tenich.html
http://www.terrynorm.ic24.net/nicholas%20glais%20sonnets.htm

See also:
David W Howell, `Nicholas of Glais: The People's Champion’ Clydach Historical Society (1991)
John Roose Williams, `T. E. Nicholas: proffwyd Sosialaeth a bardd gwrthryfel’ (1971)

Jock Nicolson

At the age of 17, in 1936, Jock Nicolson, was sacked for trying to start a union in a small sheep wool workshop. After a spell of unemployment, he got a job on the railways at the beginning of the Second World War, as a `caller up’ at Hamilton West locomotive depot in Scotland. A night shift job, it required him to cycle to drivers’ and guards’ homes in the early hours to wake them in good time for them to start their 6 a.m. shift. Nicolson’s father had worked at the depot and his brother had been called up for the armed services, so he qualified to be placed on a waiting list for a job.

During the war, he was able to obtain a position as a locomotive fireman, a hard and dirty job and became a highly active member of the Communist Party. In 1950, he moved to London, where he built up a routine sale of between 30 and 50 Daily Workers each day, with up to a 100 for special editions - at the Camden loco depot. An attempt by the British Transport Police to charge him under railway by-laws for selling on the company’s premises without permission was satisfactorily dealt with by his union.

Secretary of the North London district council of the National Union of Railwaymen in the 1960s, from 1974 Nicolson also served two terms of three years each on the national executive of the NUR.

He contested the St Pancras North constituency in four general elections as a Communist candidate and stood for the GLC in its first year. An autobiography by Nicolson remains so far unpublished and he died on August 25th 2007

NUR Transport Review March 27th 1992; unpublished autobiography of Jock Nicholson

Melita Norwood

Melita Norwood, known throughout her life as `Letty’, was born on March 25th 1912 as Melita Sirnis, since her father was a Latvian immigrant bookbinder, although her mother was English. Her father, Alexander Sirnis, who died of tuberculosis when she was six, had settled in Hampshire in 1903 after a period in California. From 1911, he was a member in exile of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He was the Southampton based founder of the `Southern Worker and Labour and Socialist Journal’ and was a close comrade of Theodore Rothstein; they both frequented the Communist Club in Charlotte Street, London. Her mother, Gertrude (née) Stedman, was an early intelligence agent, possibly for the Comintern. Letty and her sister certainly mingled in the company of their mother’s friends who were agents.

Melita attended Southampton University, after grammar school, to study Latin and Logic but left after a year. The family moved to London in the 1930s, seeking work. Melita had been a member of the ILP but joined the Communist Party in 1936 and was never to leave it, being a member of the Communist Party of Britain to her death on June 2nd 2005, aged 93. In the last six years of her life, she become notorious due to having been a Soviet intelligence agent for 39 years, being recruited to serve in that capacity from 1934 as agent Hola.

From 1937, she worked first as a clerk and then as a secretary in the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association near Euston. The most significant of these materials being worked upon, from 1941, was uranium, its potential as a means of developing an atom bomb already clear to the scientific community. Despite her radical background, she was given security clearance when first checked in 1945 but, in the early years of the Second World War had begun photographing relevant research papers stored in the Association’s safe.

The intelligence she supplied brought the Soviet Union up to speed with the British-American atom bomb project and pointed it to further information-gathering operations in the US, enabling knowledge of the technology only two years after it has been developed. The service she performed is arguably analogous to the fifth Cambridge spy, who leaked the British military’s knowledge of the new armour plating of the German Tiger tank, withheld from the then Soviet ally, so as to enable them to destroy the superior German armoured capacity in the biggest tank battle ever, at Kursk and thus turn the tide of the war.

Supposedly, her vetting access to government documents was withdrawn in 1951 but the fact that she had been a security leak was not discovered until 1999. It was claimed at the time of her exposure that British security services has received information that she had been a security risk in 1965 but only firmly suspected the year she retired from the Research Association in 1972 and was secretly awarded the Order of the Red Banner by the Soviet Union in 1958, the only British agent to receive this.

For the many long years before her exposure as a KGB agent, Melita led a quiet suburban life in Bexleyheath, devoted to her family, the Party, the Morning Star (she kept up a round of 32 papers daily), the Co-op and the peace movement. Her political allegiance was well known in the community and she was married to a fellow Communist Party member, a teacher, Hilary Norwood, who had been known as Nussbaum until the night before their marriage. His father had been a close comrade of Letty’s father.

A KGB archivist defected to Britain, bringing six trunks of documents. Although this revealed her code name it did not supply her identity. After a Cambridge academic produced a book based on these, thus supplying the defector with something of an income. The details eventually enabled Melita to be tracked down by a hungry press in September 1999. The government announced that it had legal advice that a prosecution would be inappropriate.

She made only one public statement: “I do not consider myself a spy … In general, I do not agree with spying against one’s country … I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, good education and a health service … I wanted Russia to be on an equal footing with the west.”

Guardian 28th June 2005, Morning Star 29th June 2005, Observer 3rd July 2005

Sean O’Casey

A world famous Irish playwright, O’Casey worked as a labourer in his teens. In his 20s, he joined the revolutionary socialist movement and became, eventually, the secretary of the Irish Citizen Army, the self-defence force established by the trade union movement.

In the 1920s, Abbey Theatre presented his `Juno and the Paycock’ and soon followed it with `The Shadow of a Gunman’. His `Plough and the Stars’, a realistic and unsentimental presentation of the 1916 Rising brought his uneasy relationship with the Irish literary establishment to a crisis.

O’Casey became a member of the British Communist Party and was for many years a member of the editorial board of the Daily Worker. He wrote `The Star Turns Red’, a funny projection of the socialist revolution in Ireland, for London’s Unity Theatre. O’Casey died in 1964 at age of 84.

Morning Star March 1st 1989

Joe O’Connor

A prominent republican in Ireland in the 1940s, he moved to Britain and joined the Communist Party. Active in the railworkers’ union, he was a long-standing member of the North London Council of the NUR.

L P O’Connor

Born in 1917, O’Connor was born in southern Ireland and came to Britain in 1932. An executive member of Luton Trades Council, he served in Italy, North Africa and Sicily during the Second World War. He was Chair of Corby Construction Workers Society, the town where he lived, and a member of the National Union of Railwaymen. He was the Communist Party’s candidate for the Kettering constituency in the 1950 general election.

Paddy O’Daire

An officer in the 20th Battalion of the International Brigade, Paddy O'Daire was a native of Glenties, County Donegal. Although very young at the time, he had played a part in the last stages of the Irish War of Independence. Having been forced to emigrate after the Irish Civil War to Canada, he became active in the worker's movement there, serving a sentence of 15 months hard labour for his activities.

On his release he was deported. In December 1936 he was with the Irish volunteers on the Cordova front where he was wounded. In the course of the Spanish war he developed into an outstanding military leader, being in 1938 "Director of Operations" of the XV Brigade. In World War II he joined the British Army in the fight against Hitler as a private.

In 1939, along with other IB veterans, he volunteered for a dangerous experiement, conducted by JBS Haldane. This involved the earlier sinking of the British submarine Thetis with 99 lives lost off Liverpool. The volunteers spent time in a simulated compressor to reconstruct the effects of being in a sunken submarine. O’Daire would rise to the rank of Major by the time of his demobili¬sation and lived in the English Midlands in the post-war period.

Source: Michael O’Riordan “Connolly Column” (1979)

Effie O’Hare

With her husband, Dan O’Hare, Effie was part of the Communist Party leadership in the Vale of Leven and Dunbarton area, which was able to win a significant electoral voice for the Party in the post-war period, including many councillors. Indeed, the Vale was noted for its huge Communist presence and outstanding sales of the Daily Worker. Effie kept the flag flying long after many of her contemporaries had pre-deceased her, playing a role in speaking of the great struggles of the past in local schools and campaigning against the nuclear base on the Clyde not so far from where she lived. Effie was in her 90s when she died in 1999, after a lifetime’s commitment to Communism.

Morning Star 6th August 1999

Elsie Oliver

Elsie Oliver was born Elsie Cousins in Woolwich on 30th October 1929, the daughter of Jimmy and Alice Cousins.

She joined the YCL, aged 14 years, when there were two branches in Dagenham. Along with other local YCLers, she was also active in the Woodcraft Folk. A memorable experience for her was canvassing with other YCLers in Stepney, when Phil Piratin won his parliamentary seat in 1945 and heckling the Tory candidate in Barking with her friend who was a member of the Labour League of Youth. Despite her parents’ obvious indulgence and encouragement of this political activity, Elsie encountered more typical parental responses when she arrived home at midnight after a 21 mile YCL hike thinking her parents would be impressed with her dedication. But, she writes, “was I in trouble!” Another, more positive, experience arose with Elsie’s first job, as a junior clerk in the Labour Research Department (LRD), where she encountered Noreen Branson (See separate entry for Branson.)

The YCL and South Dagenham Communist Party had premises, called Unity House, near to the Ford plant and many local activities associated with the Party and its allies took place there. Elsie was, like many young people of her generation, active in the burgeoning folk scene of the early 1950s. She joined the Party during the 1960s, in Dagenham, and continued to be active there and then in Southend, on moving to Rayleigh, being a member of the Essex District Committee for a period.

Married to Chas Oliver, born 4th March 1930, with whom she had four children, Elsie and her husband were Woodcraft Folk adult leaders, taking delegations to Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia, maintaining this interest in their mature years through the WF supporters’ council. Whilst never a Party member, Chas was a sympathetic and active trades unionist all his working life. An assistant shop steward at when working at Harland and Wolff, he was a shop steward and health and safety representative and convenor whilst working as an electrician for Woolwich Ferry for 29 years. He played a leading part in the campaign to resist the break up of the GLC during Thatcher’s years and was elected a member of the London Co-op Education Committee.

Elsie began as a teacher in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham in 1972. An active member of the NUT, Elsie became a Health and Safety Representative in a lively union branch that contained several Communist Party members, including Ann Pocock and Bernard Regan. She took part as a member of a delegation to the former Soviet Union, led by Ann Simpson, which visited Kiev, Minsk and Moscow. She was sponsored by Barking and Dagenham Education Department to undertake part-time study for a Bachelor or Education degree, completed in 1981.

Elsie Oliver

Members of CND since 1961, the Olivers have continued to support the peace movement, even to the present being involved in the Stop the War Coalition. In the 1980s, they kept up their long commitment by supporting the main progressive causes of the period, participating in the People’s March for Jobs, campaigning work for the nurses and the NHS generally and, of course, in solidarity with the miners in the 1984-5 Great Strike, and Wapping. Elsie has produced her biography, “A Bond Between Us”. (In a section of the site devoted to biography that is inevitably dominated by the deceased, we should of course stress that both Chas and Elsie are still very much with us!!)

Source: Elsie Oliver

Jimmy Ord

Born in 1902, Jimmy Ord was a founder member of the Communist Party, He was a leading light of the Kirkcaldy Communist Party in Fife, along with Johnny MacGregor and Angie Noble. The local Party in the 1930s had about 50 members and about 20 regular attendees at branch meetings.

It is likely that Ord was victimised following the General Strike: "Jimmy Ord had been a miner and had been victimised", according to James Allison branch organiser. Ord was local organiser for the Spanish Aid Committee in the 1930s and died in 1961.

Source: `Voices from Hunger Marchers’ - Michael Walker

Michael O'Riordan
Michael O'Riordan was born in Pope's Quay, Cork, in November 1917. His parents had moved from Béal Átha an Ghaorthaidh to the city, where his father worked as a tram driver. He attended North Monastery Christian Brothers' School and, in 1932, became a member of Fianna Éireann, the scouting movement associated with the IRA, of which Frank Ryan was at that time chief scout. He subsequently joined the IRA.
When the Spanish fascist revolt broke out in June 1936, Michael O'Riordan, then 19, volunteered for the International Brigades. Recruiting in Ireland was organised by the Communist Party of Ireland and O'Riordan made contact with Seán Nolan, its national organiser. After a briefing from CPI general secretary, Seán Murray, he sailed alone for Liverpool and then travelled by bus to London, where he enlisted at the Spanish republic's secret recruiting office using the identity of an older IRA man who had failed the medical test, since O'Riordan was under age. With four others, he travelled to Paris and was then smuggled across the Pyrenees.
He took part in all the battles of the 15th International Brigade, including the Battle of the Ebro, at which he was wounded. It was during ferocious fighting and resistance around Hill 481 in the Chabola valley, while the republican forces were retreating as a result of heavy losses from shelling by the fascist forces and bombing by nazi German bombers, that Michael was hit in the back by shrapnel from a mortar that landed behind him.
In a citation for bravery, the commanding officer said of Michael: "He carried his light machine-gun into every action and, when he was ordered to withdraw, he waited until the whole company had done so. He said that his weapon was worth a dozen men. When he was wounded, he refused to leave his position until others had to leave it. Even then, he did not leave until he was ordered."
As part of an international agreement, the republican government called upon the International Brigades to withdraw in 1938. The last seven surviving Irish participants to arrive home marched from the North Wall, Dublin, led by a piper, to a public meeting in Abbey Street.
Returning to Cork the same day, O'Riordan continued to be active in the IRA and, in 1940, took part in the attempted rescue of Tomás MacCurtain from Cork courthouse. The same year, he was arrested and interned in the Curragh camp, where he joined the Connolly Group, which had been established by Neil Goold, a member of the CPI. A number of internees joined the Communist Party while in the Curragh.
On the flirtation by some elements in the IRA with nazi Germany, O'Riordan quoted Terence MacSwiney. "If Ireland were to obtain its liberty at the expense of other peoples, it would deserve all the execration she herself poured on tyranny throughout the ages."
He was released in December 1943. On returning to Cork he obtained work as a bus conductor and joined the ITGWU (now SIPTU), remaining a member for the rest of his life. In 1945, with his friend Jim Savage, he joined the Labour Party and, with other friends and fellow former internees, established the Liam Mellows branch and contested the city council election.
He attacked members of the Labour Party in Cork for their anti-semitism, which contributed to the decision by the Labour Party head office to dissolve the branch and expel its members. They thereupon established the Cork Socialist Party and put forward O'Riordan as a candidate. He was eliminated only at the last count. The following year, he contested a by-election for Dáil Éireann and won 3,184 votes, ahead of Tom Barry, his former IRA commander, who had emulated Fianna Fáil in a red-scare campaign.
He moved to Dublin in 1947, continuing in his employment as a bus conductor, and, the following year, became a member of the Irish Workers' League, as the CPI in the South was then called.
He contributed to bringing many Irish delegations to congresses of the World Peace Council in the party's efforts to foster greater understanding among peoples and nations and opposition to nuclear weapons. During the years of the cold war, Michael O'Riordan and his family bore the brunt of the attacks on our party, suffering abuse and even physical attacks. In 1967, he became the full-time general secretary of the party and was the leading force in bringing all communists under one party structure in 1970.
He was elected the general secretary of the united all-Ireland party - a position that he retained until his retirement in 1984, when he was elected national chairman. He stayed in this office until ill-health caused him to retire in 2001. He remained a member of the national executive committee.
Michael O'Riordan was a defender of the Soviet Union throughout his life and always argued for closer political, economic and diplomatic ties between the Soviet Union and Ireland. On the same night that the Red Flag was dragged down from the Kremlin by the betrayers of socialism, Michael O'Riordan and his comrades raised the Red Flag over Connolly House, Dublin, declaring: "Our flag stays red."
In 1998, at the age of 80, he travelled to Cuba as part of the Pastors for Peace caravan in their efforts to break the blockade and isolation of Cuba imposed by the United States. In 2005, the Cuban government presented him with its highest award for friendship among the people.
He remained as committed to the cause of socialism in his final years as he did as a young man. He spent the last years of his life travelling around Ireland to speak about the Spanish anti-fascist war to the younger generation, to make them aware of those who fought and died fighting against fascism and for democracy in Spain.
Michael O'Riordan personified the best anti-imperialist traditions of the Irish people. The Communist Party of Ireland, saddened by his passing, is proud of the huge contribution he made to our party, to the Irish working class and to the cause of socialism in Ireland and of his legacy of unselfish sacrifice in the cause of the Irish and international working class. The struggle against imperialism continues.
Eugene McCartan - General Secretary Communist Party of Ireland.
Morning Star 19th May 2006

Wilf Page

Agricultural workers union activist and Communist councillor, E D P Page was born on 11th September 1913 at Cotton, Norfolk, in great poverty. He joined the RAF as a pioneering aerial photographer during the Second World War. While in the RAF, he was won to the ideas of the Communist Party. In 1945 he became the agent for Edwin Gooch, North Norfolk Labour MP and President of the National Union of Agricultural Workers. But Wilf was also elected as a Communist councillor in 1946 for Erpington on Norfolk Rural District Council, a position he served in until government re-organisation in 1974.

For most of his life he lived with his wife Christina, an USDAW activist and member of her union’s executive, at Overstrand, Norfolk.

He was convenor of the Communist Party’s agricultural advisory committee, an Executive Committee member 1967 - 1973 and Editor and regular contributor to the Party’s rural journal, the `Country Standard’, campaigning against low pay, for the abolition of tied cottages and nationalisation of the land.

A staunch member of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, he was finally elected to its executive in 1969. He was a key player in the move to merge with the T&G in 1982 and a member of TGWU GEC from 1982 to 1984. Wilf wrote a number of pamphlets on agricultural issues, including “Farming to feed Britain”, a Communist Party booklet, in 1976.

He remained Chair of Trunch TGWU until his death and was a Chair of Norfolk County Trades Council. Wilf was also chief organiser for many years of the annual Burston School Strike celebrations.

An “electrifying public speaker”, he fronted the NUAAW campaign for land nationalisation on TV and radio in the 1980s.

Wilf Page

He became President of the European agricultural workers federation but had to retire due to ill health in 1980. In 1989 he set up a local pensioners’ movement, which grew into thousands covering the whole of East Anglia, finally he became the first Vice President of the National Pensioners Convention.

Despite then being confined to a wheel chair (paid for by grateful union members) he continued to campaign. The last five years of his life were spent at Halsey House, a British Legion nursing home in Cromer.

Wilf Page remained a committed Communist, however it was said of him – no doubt by a non-Party member struggling to come to terms with the humanity of someone as committed as Wilf - that he was “never the big Russian bear, but the community owning the wealth communist”.

At a Memorial at Norwich Labour Club in May 2001, attended by TGWU General Secretaries Jack Jones and Ron Todd and, Labour MPs, Ian Gibson and Gavin Strang. Jack Jones stated “I was always impressed by his wonderfully simple and clearly stated approach to problems of people, agricultural workers especially and pensioners more recently.”

He died 8th April 2001 aged 87 at Cromer.

Morning Star April 10th 2001; Guardian April 20th 2001, Eastern Daily Press April 10th, May 5th 2001, Country Standard

Bernard Panter

As a shop steward, he led workers from the Shell Carrington site in 1968 to a mass picket at the Roberts Arundel factory in Stockport. In the early 1970s, as a full-time officer of the AEU, he and John Tocher led a series of one day strikes against the Industrial Relations Act. Panter later played a leading role in the rolling strike action by engineering workers in the north-west of England, which forced employers to concede pay increases, a shorter working week and moves towards equal pay. Later, he became the national leader of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, before taking up an appointment with the Industrial Society. He died aged 69 in 1994

Morning Star August 20th 1994

Bert Papworth

Albert (Bert) Papworth, London bus workers’ leader and the first Communist to join the TUC General Council, was known to his colleagues as “Pappy”.

He was born into a Catholic family and started union activities at the tender age of 16, Papworth is on record as saying: “My uncle was a Christian Socialist, a Bible Reader and Lay Preacher. He hated injustice. That’s how I got involved in the Working Class Movement.” From such apparently modest inspiration he soon became a tireless fighter for workers’ rights, despite his youth.

In 1916, as branch chair, he helped organise for the Municipal & General Workers at Morgan Crucible Company, when he led his first strike for “equal treatment”. Later he organised for the Workers Union at Woolwich Arsenal from 1917-1918 and again for the Municipal Workers at the Gas Light & Coke Company in 1923. As an unemployed man he refused to take work except at trade union rates. “I would not blackleg those who were working.” [Country Standard Winter 1960]

In 1927 Papworth secured employment with the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC) and soon became the branch secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) at Chelverton Road Bus Garage, Putney, South London (one London’s oldest bus depots). His reputation for organising and speaking soon won him the trust of his colleagues from across London.

The TGWU organisation amongst the London busmen stemmed back to the days of the London & Provincial Union of Licensed Vehicle Workers (LPU), which by 1913 had 9,000 out of a possible 12,000 members in membership amongst the London bus workers. The LPU was a militant, highly politicised union, commonly known as the “red button” union in homage not only to its politics but the colour of its membership badge. It would later amalgamate with the Manchester based `blue button’ Amalgamated Association of Tram and Vehicle Workers to form the National Union of Vehicle Workers. This would become the Passenger Services Trade Group of the TGWU, always a powerful and political section of the TGWU ,from January 1st 1922.

In 1932, the London General Omnibus Company faced with the depression sought a two and half to five percent pay cut and 400 sackings. Discussions dragged on until August when the TGWU leadership, fearing the use of non unionised labour secured the principle of an eight and half hour day and signed an agreement.

The more militant elements amongst the London bus workers responded by supporting Communist Minority Movement resolutions opposing the deal and in July restarting the `Busmen’s Punch’, a rank and file paper. As a result of this activity, eight or nine bus workers joined the Party. A month later on the 12th August 1932, the Busmen’s Rank & File Movement (RFM) was established and mass meetings of bus workers agreed at Penge, Stratford, Holloway, Battersea and other venues.

While Papworth was undoubtedly a major figure in the establishment of and the RFM, other key activists included Bill Jones a Communist at Dalston Garage, Frank Snelling of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and Bill Payne of Dalston. While the RFM was a “united front” organisation, in reality it worked closely with the Communist Party,. Indeed the technical Editor of the Busmen’s Punch, now selling 8,000 copies a month was Emile Burns of the Communist Party.

In 1932, the Communist Party had 40 members amongst the London bus workers; there were `cells’ at Cricklewood and Chelverton garages and a number of individuals at Holloway, Edgware, Enfield and Willesden, including Bernard Sharkey, an ex-policemen sacked during the infamous 1919 police strike. These Party members worked under the guidance of George Renshaw (See entry for Renshaw), London District Industrial Organiser of the Communist Party.

At the TGWU biennial delegate conference (BDC), Papworth spoke effectively on the need for a “United Front” against the growing menace of Fascism, so well in fact that the leadership, who opposed the motion were defeated. Building on this success and his growing power base amongst the London bus workers, Papworth was elected to the TGWU General Executive Council in 1935, the first Communist to join the union’s highest body after the BDC.

When the fascist threat materialised in Spain after Franco and his fascist allies Hitler and Mussolini attempted to seize power from the democratically elected Government, Papworth was keen to support the republican Government, joining a delegation to visit Spain in 1937 visiting Barcelona, Alicante, Valencia and Madrid. His experience in Spain deeply affected him: “I beg you to do something to help the people of Spain. Create such an agitation that the (British) National Government shall either fall beneath it or be forced to render justice to a friendly country and a friendly democratic government. Please help Spain”.

It should be recorded that at least one London bus worker, Bill Brisky, a Communist Party member from Dalston, rose to the rank of Company Commander in International Brigade and was killed at Jarama in February 1937 defending liberty in Spain; as did a number of other TGWU members including George Brown from Manchester killed at Brunete in July 1937 and Ken Bond of London at Ebro in July 1938. Jack Jones, a future General Secretary of the TGWU, also fought in the International Brigade.

On Papworth's return from Spain, he threw himself into the campaign to secure a seven hour day and to the issues of speed, meals, reliefs, stand time and weekend working. Issues agreed at a Special Delegate Conference of London bus workers in December 1936. Management refused to negotiate and a London wide bus workers’ strike started at midnight on April 30th, lasting until the 28th May, as this period included the George VI Coronation as King the strike became known as the “Coronation strike” . The strike itself ended in defeat and while defeat may have been inevitable, given the depression, the negative effects of the retreat were compounded by the role of the TGWU General Secretary, Ernest Bevin, in tacit collaboration with management. This arose primarily because Bevin both feared the power of the London bus workers and it’s Communist leadership.

After the strike, Bevin moved swiftly to expel the London strike leaders from the TGWU, Bert Papworth (CP –Calverton: Papworth actually joined the Communist Party only after the Coronation strike), Bill Jones (CP - Dalston) and William Payne were all expelled from the TGWU for life. Hayward, Bernard Sharkey (CP - Willesden garage); Bill Ware (CP - Enfield garage) were debarred from holding office in the TGWU until 1942 and Mark Cravitz barred from holding office in the union until 1940. The expulsions were ratified at the TGWU Torquay BDC in July by 291 votes to 51. Bevin then moved to marginalise the 98 CP members in 28 London garages.

The London bus workers’ simmering anger at the role of the TGWU leadership, and Bevin in particular, lead to the formation of a breakaway union by radical elements around Snelling, Payne and Hayward). This was promoted by the unlikely avowed right wing leader of the Civil Service Union, W J Brown, who later briefly joined Mosley’s New Party, before it was taken in a fascist direction.

The breakaway union, established in February 1938 was called the National Passenger Workers Union and had some immediate success. Crucially, Papworth and the Communist Party recognised the opportunism of Brown and remained loyal to the TGWU. Bevin, always the pragmatist, allowed the expelled to rejoin on the understanding that they would fight the break away union and this they did with vigour.

The left wing Unity Theatre produced a highly successful play based on the strike “Busmen” which chronicled the struggle for speed up and pay cuts to the defeat in 1937, written by Herbert Hodge a London taxi driver and Montagu Slater; Alan Bush provided the music.

Despite the defeat of the strike, defeats in Spain and expulsion, Papworth kept up his commitment to anti-fascist work, joining the Co-coordinating Committee for Anti-Fascist Activity along with, Bill Jones (TGWU London Bus workers), Harry Adams (Building workers union), R Briginshaw (NATSOPA Printers); Leah Manning (Teachers union); Ellen Wilkinson (Labour M.P); D N Pritt and the secretary John Strachey.

It was this Committee that organised the huge counter demonstration to Mosley Hyde Park Rally on 9th September 1937 over 1million leaflets were produced in aid of mass mobilisation, primarily by the Communist
Party’s publicity officer Bert Williams an ex miner. The result was that a staggering 100,000 anti fascists (including many London bus workers), faced 2,500 Mosley’s fascists protected by 6,000 police .

During the war Papworth, like so many other Communists, gave total support to the war effort and the need to increase productivity. Papworth once said to bus workers that “Our Russian comrades are working worse schedules than ours in the tanks on the battlefield in the East. They are fighting our battle.”

Soon after readmission both Papworth and Jones were elected to the TGWU General Executive Council (Papworth for the second time). In 1944 Bert Papworth was elected to the TUC General Council, as the first self-proclaimed Communist to be elected to become a member of the senior body of British trades unionism. (Bill Jones was also later elected to the TUC General Council.) Walter Holmes in the Daily Worker of the 20th October 1944 wrote “His busmen comrades call him “Pappy” but he is anything but what that might imply....The TUC General council certainly won’t find the first Communist member A. F. Papworth a sleeping partner.”

In his role as a TUC General Council member he was co-opted onto a fact-finding delegation to visit Greece in July 1946, along with H.V. (Victor) Tewson, Assistant General Secretary of the TUC and Vic Feather, then a TUC officer and a future General Secretary, to observe first hand the Army Junta’s coup and its subsequent liquidation of the newly emerged free trade unions. The delegation discovered that the Greek Army Junta had replaced or imprisoned all the Greek trade unions leaders of worth and replaced them with leaders who had in many cases collaborated with the Nazis.

In the Cold War, concern at the Communist Party’s growing influence in the trade unions was fanned by the right wing press and right wing union officials disturbed by the Party’s organisational skills. Party members dominated the leadership of at least the Engineering Union, the Electrical Union, the Fire Brigades Union, and the Foundry workers Union and was influential in many others. Despite the hysteria and bevin’s replacement as General Secretary, Arthur Deakin, in 1948 eight Communist Party members won seats on the TGWU GEC, up by four from two years previously.

These were: Bert Papworth and Bill Jones from London Region, Jim Sloan (Irish Region), Charles McKerrow (Scottish Region), Bert Slack (Road Haulage), Alex Grant (Passenger Transport), John Trotter (Building) and Muriel Rayment (Metal & Engineering). Muriel Rayment, a Communist Party Central Committee member, worked at EMI and was a leading campaigner for Equal Pay.

Deakin responded in similar fashion to Bevin but even more ruthlessly by winning a decision to ban all Communists from office from January 1st 1950. Not only did the GEC members loose their seats but nine full time officials lost their paid jobs and hundreds of lower committee members and shop stewards were ejected from their role unless they could prove that they had jettisoned the Communist Party. This position was not reversed until the T&G Rules Conference of 1968, when Jack Jones was incoming General Secretary.

Michael Walker; Source: `Radical Aristocrats – the London Busmen’ by Ken Fuller

John (Jack Pascoe) 1906-1963

Pascoe joined the Communist Party in 1928 in Bermondsey. He was involved in the struggles against Mosley's fascists in the 1930s. A member of the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers, he served in the Royal Air Force. Jack Pascoe was a delegate from the British Party to the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He married twice, his second being to Iris, who was also Party member.

Source: Ivor Craft (from Australia - who would also like any more information readers can supply on his father)

Billy Paterson

A Young Communist League member in Partick, Scotland, Patterson joined the Royal Navy in 1939. His ship was sent to Dunkirk to help bring by the stranded British troops and was attacked by German dive bombers in force and the order was given to "abandon ship". Billy stuck to his guns and brought several enemy planes, and saved the ship. Like a number of other Communists during the war he received and accepted an award from the King for his heroics.

Frank Paterson

Frances Armstrong Paterson joined the Communist Party in Glasgow in 1922 and, in 1930, became a partner of the Workers Press, the company that produced the Daily Worker.

In this capacity, he was charged in July 1930 with contempt of court and sentenced to six months imprisonment when the paper was said to have “lowered the authority of Mr Justice Swift” in one of its editorials. The following year, when the Daily Worker published a sailors’ manifesto at the time of the Invergordon Mutiny, Paterson was sentenced to two year’s in jail under an Act of 1797. On his release, he continued his work for the paper, first in the Advertising Department and later as a sub-editor.

After leaving the paper in 1960, he worked for the Chinese and Czechoslovakian news agencies and retired in 1972. Paterson died aged 79 on June 2nd 1986.

Morning Star June 6th 1986

William Paul

Willie, or as he was more widely known later in life, Bill, Paul was born in 1884. He joined the Glasgow Socialist Labour Party (SLP) early on and was to become its leading Marxist theorist and tutor and later a founding member of the Communist Party and one of its key figures in the 1920s.

He was based in Derby from around 1910 or 1911 and earned a living by running a small hosiery and drapery market stall as a one-man business. This gave the necessary independence required to become a semi-professional revolutionary and was so lucrative that other stalls were opened in Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Rotherham and Chesterfield. These were surreptitiously used as centres for radical literature distribution and revolutionary fund-raising. Whilst this business and the role of wandering Marxist tutor brought Paul to temporary stays in many northern and midland’s towns and cities, he was mainly resident in Derby for the rest of his life, where he was married and had one daughter in the late 1920s.

During the 1914-18 war years, at least, in common with Arthur MacManus (see entry), Paul was a close personal friend of the Derby anti-war activist, Alice Wheeldon, and her family. (MacManus regularly came to Derby in connection with the shop stewards’ movement and was a welcome visitor to the Wheeldon’s; he eventually married the second daughter Hettie.) Alice Wheeldon, who may have been involved in assisting army deserters to escape via Ireland to the USA, was imprisoned after an agent provocateur testified that she had planned a plot to poison the Prime Minister, Lloyd George! However, it seems more likely that she had sought to obtain poison to dispose of guard dogs to aid conscript escapes from army prisons.

Paul was joint editor, with Tom Bell (see entry), of the SLP’s journal, `The Socialist’, and enjoyed a strong reputation as a formidable Marxist lecturer and theoretician. His SLP social science classes in Derby from 1917-18 were especially well attended and have been compared by the son of a contemporary `student’ as having the same degree of repute as the similar approach of the Clydeside, John MacLean, in that highly complicated questions were well understood by gigantic audiences of working class people.

A book of his lectures entitled “The State: its origin and functions” was published as a result of these classes. The work clearly follows classic Marxist themes, but more interestingly draws the same or similar theoretical conclusions as Lenin was reaching at the same time, without the benefit of Paul being able to read Lenin’s work at this point, since it had not yet been translated.

Paul was also involved in Derby’s Clarion Club and in Manchester played a role in the Labour Party. No doubt his base in Manchester facilitated his contesting the 1918 election in Ince for the SLP, where he took 13% of the vote in a straight fight with an official Labour candidate.

At the time of the foundation of the Communist Party, Willie Paul lived at ‘Pen Bryn’ in what was then athe village of Littleover, just on the outskirts of Derby. he was the key figure in the Derby Communist Unity group, which united local SLPers and Derby’s branch of the British Socialist Party. He was made a member of the Communist Party’s Provisional Executive Committee, having been particularly involved in the debates inside the SLP over the unity process and the nature of the new party. He was a major influence in coalescing those in the SLP who favoured joining the CPGB.

At the founding conference however, Paul displayed much of the revolutionary zeal, which the SLP had made its hallmark, by speaking against affiliation to the Labour Party in a most scathing and cynical way. This was of course entirely consistent with the SLP’s view of the matter. Nevertheless, the anti-affiliationists were beaten in the debate and the Communist Party’s policy was to be for affiliation.

Paul’s Derby Communist Unity Group was one of many smaller, local societies represented at the founding Unity Convention. The national Communist Unity Group was the faction inside the SLP, which had convened a special national conference at Nottingham to win the SLP to the notion of unity of all communist organisations. The majority of the SLP official leadership expelled the CUG activists for this action but most members followed Paul and his (subsequently more famous) Glasgow comrades into the new Party. Whilst the SLP rump carried on as a shell organisation it was a mirage for decades to come and eventually faded away.

Paul played an important role nationally for some time to come in the young Communist Party. He was editor of the `Communist Review’, the CPGB theoretical journal from 1921-3. He stood again for Parliament, unsuccessfully, contesting the Manchester Rusholme constituency as a Labour-Communist candidate in the general elections of 1922 and 1924. It should be noted that he was bravely following Communist Party policy, even though he disagreed with it.

Paul was, thus, well known in Manchester, having had strong local connections there for at least ten years. He had often “rendered songs of the Irish potato famine” at the Openshaw BSP meetings for Harry PoIlitt, later to become the long-standing leader of British Communism. Paul has been described by PoIIitt’s ‘official’ biographer as a “powerful and expressive baritone”.

He polled a respectable 21% of the vote against strongly fielded Tory and Liberal opponents in the 1922 election. In the following election, he achieved much the same result, but increased the share of the vote, this time as an official Communist with Labour backing.

He then became the editor of the Communist Party inspired `broad left’ journal, the `Sunday Worker’, for the short period of its existence in the late 1920s. This reached a circulation of 100,000 and was unarguably a great success for the Party, so much so that it encouraged the drive to achieve a daily paper, the Daily Worker.

Leaving the national stage during the period of the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the CPGB, mainly possibly to marry and bring up a daughter, Paul nonetheless remained on the fringes of Communist politics all his days. In the 1930s and l940s he was closely identified with Soviet friendship activities in Derby. During the second world war, he was much involved in campaigning work in aid of the Soviet allies in Derby and and was a prominent supporter of the Derby Peace Council in the l950s.

He was widely regarded as a man of substance in the local labour Derbyshire movement, even though he was not particularly active in his later years, some have suggested due to family reasons. A veteran Communist Party member in Derby once implied that first his wife and then his daughter were violently opposed to his politics, the latter being embarrassed by the fame that his name still possessed decades after his death. Sadly, all his papers and documents were disposed of by the family when he died in 1958 in Derby but he had foresight to leave his considerable personal library to the Party in his will.

Publications by Willie Paul: (All SLP texts published in Glasgow.)

“Debate between G G Coulton and William Paul - compulsory military service” SLP (1912)
“Karl Liebknecht: The Man, His Works and Message” SLP (c1914?)
“Hands off Russia ... an analysis of the Economics of Allied Intervention in Russia” SLP (c1917)
“Labour and Empire - a study in Imperialism” SLP (1917)
“The State - its origins and function” SLP (1917)
“Scientific Socialism: its revolutionary aims and methods” SLP (1918)
“The State - its origins and function” [enlarged and revised edition] SLP (1919) -also reprinted by Edinburgh Proletarian Publishers (1974)
Preface to “The New Communist Manifesto of the Third International” SLP (August 1919)
“The Irish Crisis” Communist Party (1921)
“Labour Imperialism and the Experts Report” [concerns the Dawes Plan] Rushholme Division LP (1924)
“The Path to Power - the Communist Party on Trial” Communist Party (1924)
“Communism and Society” Communist Party (1927) [Harold Laski called it “easily the ablest English exposition of the communist position” in his “Communism” Willlams and Norgate (1927)}

Sources: Graham Stevenson, personal knowledge and also `Defence or Defiance – a history of working class and progressive movements in Derbyshire’ (See elsewhere on the site.); `Official Report of the Communist Unity Convention’ - London July 31st to August 1st 1920 Facsimile Reproduction - CPGB (June 1968); John Mahon “Harry Pollitt” Lawrence and Wishart (1976) p35;

John Park

A well-known optician in Barnsley, Park was a Communist candidate in the town’s local elections of 1945. As a Labour Party member, he had been an EC member of the Barnsley Trades and Labour council, as a delegate from his union, NUDAW, the shop workers, from 1941. From there, in 1943, he was elected the Trades and Labour Council representative on Board of Management of the Beckett Hospital. The following year, he became a co-opted member of Barnsley Education Committee. During the general election of 1945, Park had been the meetings organiser for Fred Collinridge, the Labour MP. He was also auditor for Barnsley Trades Council Club and Institute.

Source: Barnsley CP 1945 election address

Eric Park

Eric Park was active for over 50 years in YCL and Communist Party in Scotland. He was active in the Clyde Apprentices Committee in a major strike wave in his youth. The Economic League reported to the Engineering Employer’s Federation in 1952 that Eric Park, Jimmy Reid’s successor as secretary of the CAC, was an apprentice engineering draughtsman, the son of a long-time CP mother, a ‘wearer of very powerful lensed glasses, indicating bad sight …’ and a YCL member! After some years working as an engineering worker he later became a lecturer at Glasgow college. He was active in CND and Medical Aid for Cuba in retirement and died aged 73 in 2002, retaining his support for Communism to the end of his life.

Will (Bill) Paynter

Thomas William Paynter was born in December 1903 at Whitchurch, Cardiff. During his life he was more commonly known as 'Will' and later 'Bill' Paynter. His father was a farm labourer who later became a coal miner at Cymmer Colliery, Porth. His mother, in common with many who flocked into the South Wales coalfield in the early years of the last century, had her roots in Somerset.

Will Paynter was educated at Whitchurch (Cardiff) and Porth Elementary Schools, leaving school aged 13 in order to work on a farm. In 1917, Will Paynter began work at the Coedely colliery as a collier, on the edge of the Rhondda, within a year he had moved to Cymmer Pit, where his father had always worked. After the General Strike of 1926, he began to take full advantage of the local Workmen's Institute libraries in the Rhondda for study and he was introduced to Marxism. Will Paynter was elected Checkweigher at Cymmer Colliery in 1929.

Paynter – as he was often simply called - joined the Communist Party during the Parliamentary election campaign in 1929 in support of Arthur Horner in Rhondda East and this saw the start of a close life-long association between the two men. Paynter became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and was one of its organisers in South Wales at the time. He was to admit in later years that he had been a communist for some time but, out of respect for the feelings of his deeply religious family, had delayed joining the Party. He soon became Secretary of the Porth Communist Party branch and acquired two paper rounds, `Workers’ Life’ and the `Sunday Worker’.

For five years until 1936, he was a full time activist for the Communist Party and the National Unemployed Workers' Movement. In 1931 he was victimised and then imprisoned in Cardiff jail for his trade-union and political activities and was expelled from the Cymmer Lodge for supporting a Communist Party candidate in the local election.

He was a student at the Communist Party’s school in Abbey Wood, Kent and, for a period from late 1932, Paynter then studied for a time at the Lenin School in Moscow and was involved in underground activities in Nazi Germany, assisting the escape of Communists and Socialists. When returning from Moscow in the early 1930s he was a Marxist tutor for the National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC) classes in the Rhondda.

He led three major Hunger Marches, in 1931, 1932 and 1936. On the 1932 March he was Treasurer of the South Wales contingent and in 1936 he was one on the leaders of the South Wales contingent democratically elected at Cardiff by the Marchers. In 1935 he stood for election to the local Rhondda Urban District council for the Port seat.

In 1936 Paynter was elected onto the rank and file Executive Council for the South Wales Miners' Federation (SWMF) for the Rhondda. He was sent into Bedlinog to help with the campaign to break up the scab union at Taff Merthyr. However in the Spring of 1937 he was given official sanction from the SWMF to join the British Battalion of the International Brigades as a political commissar.

The South Wales District of the Communist Party had been asked to choose someone suitable for the position, to look after the British Battalion's interests at the International Brigades' Headquarters at Albacete. Paynter was not over-enthusiastic since he had only recently married. Nonetheless, he and Ted Bramley of the London District of the Party were sent out in May 1937. Paynter went with the support of the South Wales Miners' Federation to be a political commissar.

Paynter was released from his duties in Spain in order to return home to defend his position on the SWMF Executive Committee. He was elected agent in the Rhymney Valley in 1939 and this marked the start of a long career with the South Wales miners for the next two decades and he became President of South Wales miners from 1951-1959.

In 1959, Paynter was elected by an overwhelming majority as General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, a position he held until 1968. He and his family moved to London to take up the post. His great challenge, in a union where the Presidency was dominant, was to face a right-wing dominated National Executive. His commanding achievement was to bring about the unification of the British miners under one wages system - the National Power Loading Agreement. It was this that provided the spring-board for the great advances of the miners in the early 1970s long after he retired.

He was a member of the General Council of the TUC for one year and a member on the Arbitration Panel for the Advisory Arbitration and Conciliation Service from 1972. Will Paynter officially retired in 1968 and left the Communist Party over a difference on his decision to join the Commission on Industrial Relations in 1969 against Party advice. But swiftly resigned the commision role once it had become unambiguously seen as a way of attacking the trade union movement and later took a Party card again.

He was an active member of many societies and campaigns, especially in retirement, including the International Brigade Association, Chile Solidarity, the Pensioners' Movement (he was Secretary of the London Joint Council for Senior Citizens and Chairman of the London Region, National Federation of Pension Associations, the Peace Movement, Llafur (the Welsh Labour History Society, of which he was President) and the Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities. He was greatly involved with the workers' education movement, frequently lecturing at schools and conferences and helping in the development of the South Wales Miners' Library at the University of Wales Swansea. In 1970 he published a book 'Trade Unions and the Problems of Change' and also wrote an autobiography, entitled 'My Generation', published in 1972.

Will Paynter married twice, once in 1937 and again in 1943, having in total 7 children, all sons, including two sets of twins. He was described as “a slight intensely tough little man, he has the walk of an ex-sailor, with his shoulders slouched and his hands in his pockets. A life-time of political struggle has left its lines on his face and when he speaks he often adopts the unconscious arrogance of someone who believes that there are only two classes of men - the miners and the rest.". He died aged 81 in 1984.

Sources:

Hywel Francis oration at Paynter’s funeral, Hendon Crematorium on
16 December 1984, transcribed by Michael Walker

Bert Pearce

Born January 6th 1919, in Pembroke Dock, his mother was an enthusiastic Co-operator and his father, a teacher, was a Christian socialist, pacifist and Baptist lay-preacher. His politics were derived from the poverty he saw in his community after the dockyard closed in 1926. Ten years later, he became a clerk at the local labour exchange, and soon afterwards joined the Communist Party. He moved to Birmingham in 1938 and, in 1941, became a fulltime party organiser. In 1946, he married fellow Welsh communist Margaret Forbister, whom he had met at a May Day rally the previous year.

Throughout his later years, Pearce was at the centre of internal Communist Party conflict, certainly from the moment of the sharp criticism of the 1968 events in Czechoslovakia. He was strongly identified with nurturing support for the young revisionist vanguard in the Party. As District Secretary of the Party in Wales, this placed him on the EC at a time of growing division. He was a member of the editorial board of Marxism Today (and a Welsh version, Cyffro) at the most critical of junctures. With the demise of the CPGB, he was fully behind the creation of Democratic Left. For the last decade of her life, he was a fulltime carer to his sick wife. Pearce himself died aged 83 on August 21st 2002.

Guardian 16th September 2002

Mike Perkins

Long-standing member of the Communist Party, Mike Perkins was elected to his union branch committee at the age of 30, he served first the customs and excise officers’ union and then the Society of Civil and Public Servants, which it joined with. He was sometime President and also Vice-President of the SCPS, which is now part of PCS. Perkins died of a heart attack in June 1987, at the relatively young age of 47.

Morning Star June 24th 1987

Wogan Phillips

The artist son of a ship owner, born 25th February 1902, later in life Phillips became the Lord Milford, the 2nd Baron of Milford. As such, he was famously the only Communist in the House of Lords. Despite the ridicule sometimes bestowed on this role by the mainstream media, it had not been Phillips’ choice to take his seat. Harry Pollitt had urged him to go to the Lords, as was his right under inheritance laws, to speak against the very existence of the chamber and his presence there.

Phillips married artist Rosamund Nina Lehmann, herself the daughter of an MP, in 1928. She dedicated her acclaimed "note of music" in 1930 him; she also wrote `Dusty Answer’, which achieved her fame. Known as Ros and Wog, they were friends with Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf.

Phillips was in Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish civil war and immediately joined the Medical Aid to Spain campaign as an ambulance driver driving between Valencia and Albacete. He treated a stream of wounded from the battle of Jarama in a makeshift hospital and was wounded in the later fighting in Segovia. Phillips also used his knowledge of commercial shipping to break the fascist blockade of Spain, helping to establish the refugee ship committee, formed to evacuate Republican political refugees to Mexico. In 1937, Phillips joined the Communist Party.

During the Second World War, he failed his medical for armed service and became a farmer in the Cotswold and Chair of Cheltenham branch of the National Union of Agricultural Workers. His Butler’s Farm provided the venue for the Gloucestershire Agricultural Workers Union annual rally and was also a haven of peace for many an international progressive leader. From this time, he was a long-standing member of the national Agricultural Advisory Committee of the Party and Editor of the `Country Standard’, the Communist Party's rural & countryside journal, first established in 1935.

Wogan Phillips was an inveterate election candidate for the Communist Party both as a local candidate and for the Cirencester and Tewksbury constituency. In 1946, he won a seat as a Communist on the Cirencester District Council, loosing the seat as the Cold War began in 1948.

He staged an attempt at a come back during the 1950 General Election. Hymie Fagan, reporting on this (News & Views March 1950), stated that "the CP had organised 5,381 meetings during the election. Meetings were held in places where there had never been Communist meeting before. Thus in Tewkesbury and Chichester, one of the most backward political constituencies in England, the handful of comrades who ran the election organised thirty-five meetings in villages with 400 inhabitants or over.

In the words of Ernie Brown, who was working in the constituency: "When the list was completed it was found that in no place chosen had there ever been a Communist meeting before, except in Tewkesbury." The meetings m this constituency were carried through in the teeth of the most violent hostility from the reactionaries. In this part of Gloucestershire there are large numbers of fascist "displaced" persons—retired Army officers, landowners, wealthy farmers, landed gentry—-as well as a large colony of Mosley fascists.

These followed our comrades round from meeting to meeting, howling, shouting, threatening physical violence. They threw potatoes, tomatoes, eggs, and even a turkey. This was thrown from a car which, loaded with fascists, attempted to force the car of the candidate, Wogan Philipps, into a ditch. Yet every meeting -was carried through to the end. Not only that, but the comrades also sold 1,250 Socialist Roads and 800 Election Specials, mostly from door to door. Ten thousand leaflets were distributed and 12 quire of Daily Workers sold on the three weekends prior to polling day.

Small wonder that a sort of united front grew up between the Labour Party members and our comrades. At various villages these workers shook hands and thanked our comrades for the fight they were putting up against the Tories. On top of this, the candidate obtained 423 votes. It was an achievement.”

He very nearly came back again in electoral politics in October 1959 when, in a local rural council by-election, he only lost election by 15 votes on a 83% turnout. He went to the Soviet Union to study agriculture there in the 1960s, with his third wife Tamara (Bill Rust’s widow and also a Communist), whom he married in 1954. (He had married for a second time, Cristina Casati Stampa di Soncino, the daughter of a Marchese, in 1944.)

At one point he inherited an extensive property in Italy and successfully encouraged the farm workers to run it as a commune. Though disinherited from the family estate, first for painting a female nude complete with pubic hair and then more permanently for refusing to renounce Communism, in 1963 on the death of his father, he became Lord Milford, a title that could not be taken from him. In possibly the most original of maiden speeches in that august chamber, published as a pamphlet by the Communist Party, he called for the abolition of the un-elected Lords.

Wogan Phillips worked hard as a painter, though as a sort of hobby, throughout his life. Though he was never fashionable, he was able to successfully exhibit at different times in London, Milan and Cheltenham. His first paintings were of Rosamund, his first wife, and other, earlier paintings were often of farming scenes but later he also dealt with social and political issues. These were almost but not quite abstract and perhaps a little anarchic. One, on which he worked for years, involved a simple arrangement of a ladder and two arms, a farm worker was passing another a mug of tea; his aim was to reflect the dignity of labour. Wogan Phillips died on 30th November 1993, aged 91 years.

Michael Walker (News and Views); Morning Star 2nd December 1993; Guardian 3rd December 1993

Phil Piratin
Phil Piratin was born on 15th May 1907 and is best remembered for being one of the Communist Party’s Members of Parliament. The youngest son (in a family of ten siblings) of an East End of London Russian Jewish immigrant small tradesman, he was educated at a London County Council Elementary School. Piratin left home at the age of 17 and did a variety of jobs including a short spell at sea.

As one of the protestors at the British Union of Fascists 1934 Oswald Mosley Olympia rally, he was convinced of the need to join the Communist Party. Very soon, he was leading his local Party branch, displaying an action-based leadership style. Piratin rapidly evolved into a noted anti-fascist and defender of tenants' rights, Piratin and others, such as Tubby Rosen and Michael Shapiro, set up the Stepney Tenants Defence League. At one point some 10,000 tenants in the area were on rent strike; the campaign led to rent reductions and to a speeding up of repairs.

Piratin famously was at the centre of the Battle of Cable Street and became the first Communist councillor in London in 1937, when he was elected for the Spitalfields ward to Stepney borough council. He was chair of the borough’s Communist Party. A Jew himself, he was a leader of the opposition to Oswald Moseley's anti-semitism and his British Union of Fascists' marches through East London. In 1936 a quarter of a million people stopped Mosley’s party marching through the East End. His book, `Our Flag Stays Red’, first published in 1951 with a new edition in 1978, covers much of this territory.

He launched a campaign at Paragon Mansions, a small block of flats where tenants were threatened with eviction. Barricades were erected to keep the bailiffs away and this gave enough time for negotiations to resolve the problems.

He was an air-raid warden in the Second World War and led a campaign to supply deep bomb-proof shelters. The refusal to open the Underground for this purpose during the night was challenged by forcing locks on gates. Piratin gained further notoriety by leading 100 people to shelter in a London Underground station, a practice which then became widespread. Piratin became the West Middlesex district organiser of the Communist Party, helping to organise production committees in factories of the area.

Pre-war experiences and experience of the war itself in Stepney were reflected in mass support given to Communists in the first post-war elections in the area. Phil Piratin was elected as MP for the Mile End constituency, of which Stepney was the major part, in the 1945 General Election to sit as the Communist Party’s second MP, sitting alongside Willie Gallagher. In November 1945 twelve communists were elected to the borough council and in March 1946 two, Ted Bramley and Jack Gaster, to the London County Council.

Piratin being carried on sholder, after winning election

Piratin was defeated when he stood for re-election in 1950 in the atmosphere of an increasingly beligerent cold war; additionally, the area was changing as a result of bombing, evacuation and relocation. Oddly, when Piratin lost his seat, he actually increased his vote.

Phil Piratin

In the post war years, he remained a member of the Party and died on December 10th 1995, aged 88.

Guardian 11th December 1995; Phil Piratin `Our Flag Stays Red’ (1948)

Harry Pollitt

Born in 1890, Harry Pollitt came from a line of Lancashire working class radicals; his great grandfather had been a Chartist. An apprenticed boilermaker, he was involved in the socialist movement from an early age. Involved in the anti-war movement in 1914-18, he emerged as a shop stewards’ leader of national standing by 1919. He then was at the fore of the successful struggle to prevent the British government supplying armaments to the enemies of Soviet Russia. He played a leading role in the Communist Party in the 1920s and was a delegate from the Boilermakers’ Society to the TUC and the Labour Party conferences.

The young Harry Pollitt

Pollitt and RP Dutt worked closely together to remodel the Communist Party away from the pre-war heritage of ramshackle socialist debating societies towards a centralised, strategic force. Pollitt’s particular take on leadership represented a move away from a propagandist style of work towards organisation at the point of struggle, linking immediate struggles to longer-term objectives. Unquestionably, his great grasp was the importance of the revolutionary movement having mass links.

Pollitt was, famously, the long-term leader of British Communists, being General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1929 to 1956, with the exception of a brief interlude from 1939. Then, he and Dutt differed sharply over the characterisation of the Second World War as being either an imperialist war or an anti-fascist one. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in 1941 changed the character unambiguously and Pollitt returned to the leadership.

Pollitt was especially linked with the development of the specifically British strategic programme of the Communist Party, `The British Road to Socialism’.

Harry Pollitt

He died in 1960. A plaque dedicated to the memory of Pollitt was unveiled by the Mayor of Tameside on the twenty-second of March 1995 outside Droylsden Library.

See: `Serving My Time’ Harry Pollitt, `Harry Pollitt’ John Mahon, `Harry Pollitt’ Kevin Morgan (MUP 1993)

The obituary from the Daily Worker, June 28th, 1960 follows:

HARRY POLLITT - 1890-1960

HARRY POLLITT was one of the most popular as well as one of the greatest leaders the British working class has ever produced. He was born on November 22nd, 1890, in the textile village of Droylsden in Lancashire. His mother was a weaver and his father a blacksmith's striker, both life-long trade unionists.

EARLY IDEAS
It was from them that he obtained much of his early ideas on Socialism. In his autobiography, Serving My Time, published in 1940, he described how "it was starting work as a half-timer (at the age of twelve) with Mother that really opened my eyes to the kind of world we live in. "Every time she put her shawl round me before going to the mill on wet or very cold mornings I swore that when I grew up I would pay the bosses out for the hardships she suffered."

His mother introduced him to the Independent Labour Party at Openshaw, which he joined in 1909. Dick Coppock belonged to the same branch and often recalls the enthusiasm and eloquence of the new member.

After serving his time as a boilermaker's apprentice at Gorton Tank railway locomotive building plant, he became a first-class member of the Boilermakers' Society in 1912, retaining this membership of which he was proud-all his life. He was elected London district secretary of the Boilermakers' Society in 1919.

His revolutionary Socialist outlook made him an active and outspoken opponent of the First World War, which he regarded as a struggle between rival imperialist groups in which the workers on both sides would suffer and gain nothing.

He devoted his great energies to strengthening working-class organisation and securing improvements in pay and conditions. As a result he was victimised and found it impossible to obtain work in big factories or shipyards.

While he was working at a small workshop in Swinton, Lancashire, the news of the Russian Revolution on November 7th, 1917, arrived.

"THEY'VE DONE IT!
He immediately grasped the epoch-making nature of this event and has written that his uppermost thought was: "The workers have done it at last."

"It wouldn't have mattered," he wrote, in Looking Ahead, "where this revolution had taken place, Timbuctoo or Costa Rica. The thing that mattered was that lads like me had whacked the bosses and the landlords, had taken their factories, their lands and their banks.... That was enough for me. These were the lads and lasses I must support through thick and thin."

When the young and weak Socialist Republic was attacked by the armies of foreign capitalist and imperialist Powers - including the British - Harry Pollitt threw himself into a tremendous campaign to bring this intervention to an end.

This was the famous "Hands off Russia" movement which, at its London conference in 1919, in the presence of delegates from all parts of the country, decided to work for a general strike should the Government persist in its armed intervention against Socialism in Russia.

The campaign mounted to a high pitch of intensity, and when it was discovered in May 1920 that the Government intended to ship arms on board the Jolly George for Poland to use against Russia, the London dockers refused to load the vessel.

This was the culminating point which compelled the Government to retreat and stop its attacks.

YOUNG MILITANT
In 1912 he took part as a member of the Openshaw Socialist Society in the formation of the British Socialist Party, by amalgamation of the Social Democratic Party and various other small Socialist groups.

He was, however, always speaking and campaigning in favour of militant Socialism instead of the reformism which he saw was holding back the working-class cause.

Thus his first leaflet, produced for the Openshaw Socialist Society in 1911, entitled Socialism or Social Reform, argued:
"The word Socialism implies a complete revolution in the internal workings of the system which we call capitalism .. . social reform, however, proposes nothing of the kind, because a reform only acts on external effects brought about by internal causes. . .
These experiences made him more and more conscious of the need for an independent working-class political party that would give united Socialist leadership, instead of the divided mixture of contradictory leads loaded with reformism that was prevalent.

Accordingly he took part in 1920 in the foundation of the British Communist Party, of which he was elected general secretary in August 1929.

He held the position for twenty-seven years. In 1956 illness compelled him to retire from the position, accepting the post of chairman instead.
His illness later became more serious and he sustained a stroke in March 1958 at the age of sixty-seven.

His recovery was satisfactory enough to enable him to continue to do a great deal of political campaigning and he was given medical clearance for his visit to Australia.

INTEGRAL PART
His greatest contribution to the British working class was his success in applying his understanding of the way in which the Communist Party should function as an integral part of the Labour movement.

Under his leadership, the Communist Party learned how to give Socialist leadership while avoiding the danger of the narrow sectarianism which made the earlier Socialist groups so impotent.

In March 1925 be was kidnapped by a fascist gang to prevent him speaking at a meeting in Liverpool, and in 1925, four days after his marriage, he was arrested with eleven other leading members of the Communist Party.

The charge was one of publishing seditious libel and inciting to commit breaches of the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797.

In fact, the aim was to put this leading group of working-class Socialists out of the way because of the growing industrial storm which the ruling class realised was developing toward a general strike.

Pollitt and others were sentenced to twelve months enough to keep them locked up during the period of the General Strike which took place in 1926.

AID FOR SPAIN

He played a leading part in making it possible to launch the Daily Worker, which he regarded as essential in the struggle for peace and socialism because it would serve the interests of the working class. He never failed to campaign for the paper's Fighting Fund, describing those who gave to it as the "veritable salt of the earth, for without them there would be no daily newspaper of the working class".

During the 1930's he led great campaigns against unemployment and fascism. He played an outstanding part in the organisation of the British section of the International Brigade and other forms of aid for the Republican Government of Spain, which was under attack from Hitler and Mussolini as well as the Franco fascists. He was arrested in 1934 for speeches against the treatment of the unemployed, but later released.

He was tireless in warning the country of the consequences of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, showing that this would only strengthen fascism and the danger of war.

He helped to develop the movement for peace and collective security against fascism, which brought together people from different organisations and walks of life, and gave evidence urging disarmament at the Arms Commission in 1935.

KEY TO PEACE
The key to peace, he held, was an alliance between Britain, the Soviet Union and France to check fascism. He always maintained that the cornerstone of any peace policy for Britain was, and remains, an alliance with the Soviet Union.

During the Second World War he campaigned to secure the greatest effort for victory over the fascist powers, urging the opening of the Second Front and measures that would produce a just and lasting peace.

Since the war he has been tireless in striving to develop greater united action by all sections of the Labour movement to abolish nuclear weapons and to end American domination of this country.

Over and over again in speeches all over the country, he has returned to the idea-which he urged on a Manchester audience in February this year-that "If Britain and the Soviet Union were to sign a peace treaty no nation would dare to go to war. Britain should work with the Russians for peace, instead of with the Americans for war."

SUPERB EXAMPLE
Throughout his life he had always understood the need for the British working-class movement to fight to help the colonial people win their independence. He himself set a superb example, never neglecting an opportunity to help in this struggle.

He visited the Soviet Union first in 1921 and on each of his many later visits took great pleasure in observing the great progress being made.
He had also been to each of the Socialist countries in Europe and to China and always made a big point of explaining what he had seen to British audiences on his return.

Harry Pollitt was a human, loveable man, with a great sense of humour and a seemingly endless store of stories having not only some important political point but also their highly amusing side.

THEY MUST WIN
He made a massive contribution to Marxist thought and understanding in this and other countries by his insistence on the need for the Communist Party here to produce a long-term programme which would answer the question of what the Communists in Britain would do to get real powers for the people and solve once and for all the problems of lasting prosperity and peace.

He explained the questions that such a programme must answer. He inspired the production of the British Road to Socialism which set out in terms of British traditions, experience and institutions the path of advance to a new society to be achieved by the working-class in alliance with all progressive forces. He was tireless in his work and propaganda for this programme, explaining its proposals, emphasising its importance, and declaring his confidence in the capacity and power of the working class to break the stranglehold of British monopoly capitalism.

His supreme confidence in the British working class and its ability to achieve socialism in Britain was summed up in these words in Serving My Time:

"There is no other class but the working class for me. They give one strength, hope and inspiration. Their history is the only history worth knowing and fighting to develop in the conditions of our time. There is no sacrifice too great to be allowed to serve the working class. . . . I know that one day they will conquer power in Britain.”

BURNING FIRE
"The Communist Party will lead this struggle to its successful issue. Then, with the power in the hands of the workers, they will solve the problems of our social system that the rich can never solve. This is the dream and the aim which all the pioneers of our Labour movement have struggled to make real. This is the 'gleam' which they have tirelessly followed, which has inspired them to go to the street corners and market places to speak to a mere handful, has given them eloquence and burning fire to talk to their mates in the workshops and homes, and the certainty which has enabled them to endure crushing poverty and victimisation and made persecution easier to bear, which has steeled them to break down barrier after barrier and build up working class organisation and power."

Daily Worker, June 28th, 1960

www.communist-party.org.uk

Philip Poole

Secretary of the Worker's Theatre Movement. Poole was born in 1909, his father being a fireman in the London Fire Brigade. He attended elementary School where a left wing teacher encouraged his early interest in socialism. This interest in socialism was reinforced by the Parson at the St Botolph’s Church in Bishopgate, which he attended, who was also politically very progressive and had a large collection of socialist books.

Poole left school aged fourteen and secured a job as an office boy. He joined the Finsbury Labour Party, being the nearest to where he lived in Bishopgate in the City of London. Open air political meetings were very popular and he would carry the platform to a pitch close to Finsbury Town hall which at this time was a safe Tory area.

He then moved to Stoke Newington and rejoined the Labour Party and soon became Propaganda Secretary as well as establishing the first Labour League of Youth in Stoke Newington around 1925. He states the defeat/betrayal of the 1926 General Strike had a big impact upon his politics and pushed him further to the Left.

As a result of his perceived “Leftism” and his vote against the expulsion of the Communist Party from the Labour Party, the Stoke Newington Labour Party closed down the Labour League of Youth and despite Poole being its Secretary, he was not allowed to re join the reconstituted League. In anger he joined North Hackney Labour League of Youth, but this was Herbert Morrison’s fiefdom and this “finally shattered all my fairy dreams of socialism”. He almost immediately joined the Hackney Communist Party, but was asked to continue his membership of the Labour League of Youth and keep his CP membership “secret”. This paid off with Poole being elected to the National Executive Committee of the Labour League of Youth. But he found it difficult to keep up the pretence for long and at aged eighteen he transferred to Hackney Young Communist League, and began working for with what he (any many others) thought was an imminent British Revolution .

In 1929 Poole joined the Worker’s Theatre Movement, which consisted of about thirty local groups from Manchester, Glasgow, Liverppol, Sunderland, Castleford, Greenwich, Woolwich, St Pancras and one in Wales. Poole became the first Secretary of the Worker’s Theatre Movement in that year, with Tom Thomas as chairman, a man Poole called the “leading spirit of the movement”. Joan Horrocks was involved in organising the music side of the Movement. The group was, according to Poole, “strictly (Communist) Party” or sympathisers. Poole was also involved in the production of “Red Stage” the Worker’s Theatre
Movement journal which was produced by a son of Tom Mann, Charlie Mann. Poole was also active in his local (Hackney) Red Radio group, which had a pitch off in a cul-de-sac in Aldgate. Red Radio performed once a week a number of political sketches and songs and had its own signature tune:
“We are Red Radio,
Workers’ Red Radio,
We Show you how you’re robbed and bled;
The old world’s crashing,
Let’s help to smash it
And build a workers’ world instead”.

Phillip Poole held the position of secretary of the Worker’s Theatre Movement from 1929 -1933 during which period it had a small office at 90 Grays Inn Road, London.

Michael Walker
Source: Red Letters No:10

Raymond Postgate

Raymond Postgate, a founding member of the British Communist Party in 1920, went on to establish the Good Food Club and then, in 1950, the Good Food Guide. Raymond William Postgate (November 6, 1896 - March 29, 1971) was an English socialist journalist and editor, social historian, mystery novelist and gourmet.

Born in Cambridge, the eldest son of John Percival Postgate, a classical scholar, and Edith Allen, Postgate was educated at the Perse School, Liverpool College and St John's College, Oxford. During World War I, he sought exemption from military service as a conscientious objector but, without the defence of a religious objection, was jailed for two weeks under the Military Service Act. While he was in prison, his sister Margaret campaigned on his behalf, in the process meeting the socialist writer and economist G. D. H. Cole, whom she subsequently married. In 1918 Postgate married Daisy Lansbury, daughter of the left-wing journalist and politician George Lansbury, and was barred from the family home (but not disinherited) by his Tory father.

From 1918, Postgate worked as a journalist on the Daily Herald, then edited by his father-in-law. In 1920 Postgate was one of the founding members of the Communist Party and left the Herald to join his colleague Francis Meynell on the staff of the weekly, The Communist. Postgate soon became its editor but he left the Party after falling out with its leadership in 1922. He returned to the Herald, then joining Lansbury on Lansbury's Labour Weekly in 1925-27.

He was a department editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1927 to 1928 and published biographies of John Wilkes and Robert Emmett and his first novel, No Epitaph (1932). In 1932, he visited the Soviet Union with a Fabian delegation and contributed to the collection Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia. He was a European representative for Alfred A. Knopf publishers (1929-49).

He co-authored with G. D. H. Cole The Common People (1938), a social history of Britain from the mid-18th century. Postgate was editor of the left-wing monthly Fact from 1937 to 1939 and editor of the socialist weekly Tribune from early 1940 until the end of 1941. From 1942 to 1949 Postgate worked at the Board of Trade and Ministry of Supply.

Postgate wrote several mystery novels that drew on his socialist beliefs to set crime, detection and punishment in a broader social and economic context. His most famous novel is Verdict of Twelve (1940), his other novels include Somebody at the Door (1943) and The Ledger Is Kept (1953). (His sister and brother-in-law, the Coles, also became a successful mystery-writing duo.) After the death of H. G. Wells, Postgate edited some revisions of the two-volume Outline of History that Wells had first published in 1920.

Always interested in food and wine, after World War II, Postgate assembled a band of volunteers to visit and report on UK restaurants. He edited the results into the Good Food Guide, first published in 1951. He continued to work as a journalist, mainly on the Co-operative movement's Sunday paper Reynolds' News and, during the 1950s and 1960s, published several historical works and a biography of his father-in-law, The Life of George Lansbury. Postgate's son, Oliver became a leading creator of children's television programmes in the UK.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Postgate
John and Mary Postgate, 'A Stomach For Dissent: The Life Of Raymond Postgate', Keele University Press, 1994; and other material

Tom Potter

Tom Potter was one of the pupils of the famous Burston school strike founded in 1914, which was sparked off by the sacking of popular Socialist teachers, Kitty and Tom Higdon; most working people in the agricultural community boycotted the official school and sent their children to the strike school, which lasted for decades.

Tom Potter joined the Communist Party in 1941, became a parish and South Norfolk district councillor and was a branch secretary of the National Union of Agricultural Workers. He played a major role in reviving the history of the strike, which was led by his elder sister, Violet. One result of this work was the establishment of a museum devoted to the story of the strike located in the rebel school building. Potter died aged 70, in 1985.

Charles Poulsen

Poulsen, who died at the age of 89, was, at various times, a fur-nailer, taxi-driver, fireman, sub-editor, novelist, dramatist, historian and poet, but his greatest achievements were as an autobiographer and lecturer.

He was born in Stepney, east London, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants born October 15 1911. The profits of his father's photography business were barely sufficient to support two adults and four children, and the family lived in two rooms in bitter poverty. Poulsen was educated at Old Montague Street elementary school until he was 14. Three-quarters of the boys were Jewish, and the rest were divided between Catholics and Protestants. To solve this delicate problem, the headmaster murmured a prayer, which no one could overhear, and set the boys to sing, instead of a hymn, a chorus from Gilbert and Sullivan, for whose work Charles retained a lifelong affection.

After leaving school he worked as a fur-nailer, with intervals of unemployment, until, in 1935, he became a taxi-driver. He thus acquired an extensive knowledge of London. He also set out to educate himself and, at Stepney public library, he acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of Dickens. At the Old Vic, he learned to appreciate Shakespeare. His love of classical music was also kindled by hearing Beethoven at Circle House, the leftwing educational centre, near Aldgate.

In 1930, he joined the Young Communist League and then the CPGB, which he stayed in until dissolution. As a young man, he rejected his parents' orthodox Judaism, while retaining his respect for their way of life. He was a founder-member of the League of Militant Godless, on the Soviet model, which briefly existed in the early 1930s. In later years, he adopted a more tolerant attitude towards religion. Poulsen was on the barricades in Cable Street. He volunteered as a fireman from the outbreak of war, served through the blitz and, in 1944, accompanied the allied invasion force in the Fire Service's Overseas Column.

A political argument with another fireman inspired him to write English Episode (1946), a novel about the peasants' revolt of1381, which was translated into Russian and Polish. He worked as a make-up man and caption writer on popular educational books, before returning to the cab trade. The Word Of A King, a dramatised version of English Episode, was produced by the Unity theatre in 1951, and, through Unity, Charles met his wife Edith, an Austrian Jewish widow who had escaped with her daughter from wartime Vienna. They married in 1949. Edith shared Charles's political ideals and intellectual interests.

Charles Poulsen

He found his real vocation in the 1960s, when he began conducting highly popular evening classes on London history - including local and national history, architecture, literature, and biography - at Waltham Forest and Chingford, Essex. He continued with these for 20 years, when old age forced him to discontinue them. In this period, he wrote three more books; Victoria Park (1976), a study of East End history, The English Rebels (1984), arid Scenes From A Stepney Youth (1988). He died on September 30th 2001.

Guardian 14th December 2001

Ernie Pountney

Ernie Pountney was born on November 6th 1881, to a family with a radical background; his grandfather had been an active Birmingham Chartist. Ernie lived in Sparkhill, a district of Birmingham until he was 21. Attracted to studying, initially through religion, he became an `outdoor’ student at London University. Subsequently taking up a teaching post in Blackpool, returned to London where he worked as a clerk and then a buyer and salesman at Harrods in 1911.

He was called up in 1916 and became exposed to socialist ideas in the army. On returning after demobilisation to Harrods, he joined the shop assistants’ union. Becoming also involved in the Marxist dominated Labour Research Department, he was appointed a full-time officer in 1920 for the Knightsbridge branch of the union that emerged from post-first world war merger phase, the National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers (NUDAW, following other mergers this became today’s USDAW).

He also joined the Communist Party as soon as it was formed. Pountney became a member of the Executive Committee of the London Trades Council and the London District Committee of the Communist Party. He was West London NUDAW district secretary by the time of the general strike.

Pountney found himself expelled from NUDAW in 1928, which lost him his job, after supporting the Rego garment workers’ strike. Arising from outrage at the failure of their union to support the strike, the workers led a breakaway `red’ union, the United Clothing Workers Union. Pountney became an organiser for this, working nationally and especially in Leeds. He became its general secretary and was a Minority Movement delegate to RILU, the red union international in 1933, staying in Moscow to work for it for a year.

On his return, he worked part time for Class War Prisoners’ Aid, with Isobel Brown and part time for the National Unemployed Workers Union also. Having joined the municipal and general workers union (then the NUGMW, after several mergers now the GMB), he was elected as a branch delegate to the union’s conference but the leadership promptly debarred him from holding further office in this period, due to his Party membership. Nonetheless, he kept up his membership and years later was able to play a fuller role as a branch activist in the NUGMW and GMWU (its incarnation in the 1950s and 1960s).

In the later part of the 1930s, he began his long stint in working for the Daily Worker. Pountney was placed as the technical `owner’ of the paper, essentially the `fall-guy’ for any legal assault on it. During his stewardship, the Daily Worker was sued by Walter Citrine, TUC general secretary, for a libel against him. Pountney, who had no assets of any significant value, was unable to pay the award and was declared a bankrupt; this was no tragedy but the purpose of the exercise in placing him as owner. Nonetheless, he went on to be involved in the business side of the paper until the Peoples’ Press Printing Society, a co-operative of its readers, was formed to own and manage the Daily Worker (later the renamed Morning Star). He then headed the post and despatch department, then rather more important for circulation and finance than it perhaps sounds today. Pountney continued to work for the paper for next 20 years.

In the meantime, he also became involved in the local labour movement in Kingston, Surrey, where he lived. He was the Trades Council’s press officer, the Kingston branch secretary and stood three times as a Communist candidate in local elections.

In common with many members of the Surrey district of the Communist Party, Pountney opposed its majority position on the events in 1968 in Czechoslovakia and became increasingly vocal about the Communist Party’s stance on matters relating to the Soviet Union. Pountney wrote his memoirs at the age 91, which were published in 1973. Possibly a supporter of the New Communist Party 1977 breakaway, he was to die sometime in that decade.

Source: Ernie Pountney “For the Socialist Cause” Lawrence and Wishart (1973)

Annie Powell

Annie Powell achieved fame in her final years as a Rhondda’s Communist Mayor in 197, often erroneously said to be the first of such. But Finlay Hart had beaten her to it in Clydebank by several years. The fact that his post was called `provost’, the uniquely Scottish equivalent has clouded the issue somewhat.

Powell was a long-standing Communist Party member. A teacher and NUT activist for 40 years, she was retired by the time of her election as Mayor, she had been a Communist Councillor for 18 years and had even been Deputy-Mayor. The respect with which she was held by the community and her fellow councillors caused them to defy the usual anti-communism in local authority work. and had served 18 years as a Communist councillor. Annie Powell had also long been a member of the Welsh Committee of the Party and its Women’s Organiser for a period.

Joan Powell

Joan was born in Denton, Manchester, in 1919 into a family of working class Communists. Her parents and grandfather were founder members of the Party and she was involved in the Communist Party for most of her life fighting for many causes.

In 1978, she was one of the founder members of the Manchester TUC Pensioners Association. She was treasurer of this organisation for many years working alongside Tom, her husband, until his death.
She then took over as secretary and treasurer until 2001, when poor health made it difficult to carry on. She continued to be politically active and her last protest was the Stop the War demonstration in Manchester last September. Joan Powell died on July 14 aged 88.

Morning Star 30 July 2007

Jim Prendergast

Born in 1914-1974, Prendergast was a Communist Party of Ireland activist. He was a member of the International Brigade and then emigrated to Britain to find work. There, he was especially active amongst the Irish community. A leading figure in NUR, he was elected to its Executive Committee in 1970 and died in 1974

Source: M O’Riordan

John Prime

John Prime was the son of a Cambridgeshire butcher's journeyman. He read history at Cambridge just after the war and joined the Cambridge University Socialist Club and then the Communist Party. After university he worked at the headquarters of the International Union of Students in Prague from 1952 to 1953. In 1954 he became National Secretary of the Student Labour Federation, while working part-time in Collet's, later becoming manager of Collet's Multilingual Bookshop.

John Prime died a few years ago but the British Library's National Sound Archive holds 39 tapes (two of them closed until 2010) which he recorded before his death. They contain formation about Tom Driberg, Eric Hobsbawn, Eva Reckitt, Harry Pollitt, Betty Matthews, Edgell Rickword, and many others. Plus much about eastern Europe in 1952-1953, inter¬national student politics at that time, and the Communist Party in Britain.

Source: Chris Birch; SHS Newsletter June 2007; the National Sound Archive: nsa(a),bl.uk

Dave Priscott

Born in Portsmouth in 1918, he became an apprentice electrical engineer in the Naval Dockyard. He joined the Labour League of Youth aged 17, where he met his life-long partner, Daisy, then aged 16.

Both joined the Young Communist League in 1938. Dave worked full time for the Communist Party in Southampton, the Rhondda and then, as District Secretary in Yorkshire.

He backed the EC of the CPGB during the internal disputes of the 1980s and became a founder member of the Green-Socialist Group in Democratic Left.

Priscott died on 28th January 1995.

New Times 4th March 1995

Harold Quinton

Harold W Quinton moved to Braintree with his wife, Gladys, around 1925 where they lived with “two young children, sleeping and eating in a two small unfurnished rooms in Clockhouse Way”. Quinton was an active member of the shop workers union and by the early 1940s had become Secretary of Braintree Communist Party.

Quinton, despite initial opposition from the Communist Party leadership, was instrumental in swinging Communist and left-wing Labour Party support behind the candidature of Tom Driberg as an “independent” candidate in the June 1942 Maldon by-election. Whilst Driberg was an ex-member of the Communist Party and still sympathetic, the Party’s official position was to support the `armistice’ between existing parliamentary parties not to contest by-election seats which had not been held by their own party.

The key factor in ensuring Quinton’s support was the attack by the Tory candidate (Reuben Hunt) upon the Soviet Union in the run up to the by-election, when he stated: “We are losing in North Africa because we’ve given too much help to the Russians.”

The Secretary of the Maldon Divisional Labour Party (established 1918), the Reverend Jack Boggis (who was also secretary of Braintree Anglo-Soviet Friendship Society) resigned from the Labour Party to become Secretary of the Driberg campaign.

Driberg secured a remarkable audience of 6,000 on the 24th June 1942 for his eve of poll meeting in Braintree Market Square. At 10pm that night, when Driberg’s victory was announced, he had sensationally beaten Hunt’s 6,226 votes with a staggering 12,219 votes. The result rocked Churchill and the war-time coalition government, coming in the same week as the fall of Tobruk in Libya to the Germans. (Accordingly, Driberg was later known as the MP for Tobruk!)

Tom Driberg’s maiden speech concerned the banning of the Daily Worker but the Braintree Communist Party seems to have secured support not only Driberg’s support but also from all left wing elements in the Labour Party. According to Driberg, Quinton was disciplined by the Communist Party for his role in ensuring support for him against the Tory “Coalition” candidate, but whatever this may have amounted to, it seems to have been only tokenistic since he remained as Secretary of Braintree Communist Party.

During the war Quinton seems to have played a role in ensuring the Daily Worker was delivered to Party supporters in Army and RAF units stationed locally. Indeed, Gladys Quinton, according to fellow Communist, George Barnsby, who was stationed close by, “lavished many of her precious food coupons on feeding us soldiers”. (The Quinton’s daughter Dorothy (Dot) was well known to the then young George Barnsby.) Circulation in Braintree of the Daily Worker was organised during this period by a Mr J. Croft and other active Communists included Mrs Sylvia Hodson.

The Braintree Party was also active with the Essex-based monthly journal, `The Rural Crusader’, which was started in June 1946 by Bill Savage, the Islington Communist Party activist who moved to the county during the war. While Bill Savage was Editor, the treasurer was a Dr Garland of Great Bardfield. The Rural Crusader was an essential element in galvanising grass roots support throughout the villages of East Essex for progressive politics, based upon the widespread mood that after the war things must change for the better. The Rural Crusader’s circulation of over 2,500 per month was impressive when you consider each copy was read three of four times.

In 1946, Harold Quinton stood as a candidate for Braintree Urban District Council, securing 487 votes. The Party also stood Doug Arnold in a “difficult” ward in these elections, where he won 210 votes. The Communist candidates stood on a platform including local government housing, water supply, roads, street lighting and cultural facilities and also took up issues such as the plight of farm labourers in tied cottages, the use Prisoners of War (18,000 of the 37,000 of which worked in agriculture and were used to drive down wages) and homeless squatters at Sible Hedlingham and Great Saling RAF base. Quinton stated in the `Rural Crusader’ that, with “700 votes for Communist candidates, Braintree justified its reputation as a spearhead of the working class movement within the Maldon Division”.

In the following year May 1947, Harold Quinton was elected as a Communist councillor for East Ward in Braintree and soon introduced an remarkable innovation for those times, in holding advice `surgeries’ in various peoples’ homes around his ward, the first being in Barnham Avenue. Harold’s wife, Gladys Quinton, also stood for Braintree Urban District Council (East Ward) in 1948.

Braintree Communist Party meetings were held at Braintree Co-operative Society’s Co-op Hall at Bocking End. Speakers during August 1948 included Dr John Lewis and Communist Party theoretician R P Dutt. The Party also organised regular speakers on Saturdays at Braintree market square, where speakers would stand on a soap box. Regular speakers included Mr K Saunders of the Chelmsford Communist Party branch.

Unions close to the Communist Partly locally included the Transport & General Workers Union (TGWU) under the branch secretary Mr E E Amos, of Holmcroft, London Road, Black Notley, Braintree and the local National Union of Agricultural branches.

To highlight the depth of support that left wing ideas had in this part of Essex, one only needs to consider that a staggering 700 people attended 1947 May Day event at Maldon, a day which included children’s activities, the Thaxted Morris Dancers and Maldon Town Band. The finale of the day ended with local MP Tom Driberg crowning the May Queen – even if he did managing to crown her with the crown upside down! The Left’s Maldon by-election victory of June 1942 and the pivotal role Harold Quinton played in this was one of the most important signposts to the 1945 Labour landslide, with its huge advances for working people of this country.

Michael Walker