December 18, 2005
R to S - Compendium of Communist Biography by surname
Communist Biographies, surnames R to S follow, 83 entries @ January 2008:
Read biographies on the following below:
Bert Ramelson, Arthur Reade, Erik Rechnitz, Betty Reid, Robert Robson, George Renshaw, Edgell Rickword, Percy Riley, Charles Ringrose, T L Robb, Marion Robertson, Alec (Spike) Robson, Gertie Roche, Esmond Romilly, Idris Rose, Jean Ross, Benny Rothman, Andrew and Theodore Rothstein, Bill Rounce, Cliff Rowe, Ben Rubner, George Rudé, Bill Rust, Shapurji Saklatvala, Laurie Sapper, Alf Salisbury, Raphael Samuel, Bill Savage, Jim Savage, Reggie Saxton, Arthur Scargill, Harold Scargill, Minna Scarth, Cash Scorer, Bill Sedley, Connie Seifert, Bob Selkirk, Jim Service, Jean Shapiro, Jock Shanley, Monte Shapiro, Vishnu Sharma, Albert Shaw, Jack Shaw, Marje Schilsky, Sylvia Shellard, George Short, Colin Siddons, Shimmy Silver, Thora Silverthorne, Brian Simon, Roger Simon, Arthur C Simpson, Betty Sinclair, Eleanor Singer, Hugh Smith Sloan, Rosemary Small, Ted Smallbone, Albert Smith, Harry Smith, Jock Smith, Rab Smith, Rose Smith, Jimmy Sneddon, Willie Spraggan, Dave Springhall, Ken Sprague, D.D (Denzil) Stalford, George Stalker, Frank Stanley, Michael Stephen, Bob Stewart, Hilton Stewart, Jimmy Stewart, Dick Stocker, Frank Stone, Doug Stone, Harry Stratton, Hugh Styler, Henry Suss, Jack Sutherland, Irene Swan, Randall Swingler.
Bert Ramelson (Baruch Ramilevich Mendelson)
Born in the Ukraine on March 22nd 1910, the son of a Jewish religious teacher, he could actually remember the Russian revolution. His two older sisters joined the Bolsheviks and stayed the rest of their lives in the Soviet Union. Ramelson emigrated to Canada with other members of the family, where he won a scholarship to Alberta University.
After a year as a barrister, he joined the Canadian battalion of the International Brigade and went to fight in Spain. He was wounded twice on the Aragon and Ebro fronts. Settling in Britain, he worked for a time as a trainee manager at Marks and Spencer. In 1939, he married Marion Jessop, the author of a pioneering work of feminist history, `Petticoat Rebellion’.
He was a tank commander in the Second World War and was captured by the Germans at Tobruk in 1941. After organising an extraordinary mass break out from his prisoner of war camp, he linked up with Italian partisans who organised his return to Britain.
Ramelson became a full timer for the Communist Party in Leeds and was the Yorkshire District Secretary from 1953. He became the Party’s National Industrial Organiser, a role that was to confirm Ramelson as a man at the very core of the politics of Britain. He was a powerful orator and effective pamphleteer.
A man of powerful intellect, he was especially noted for his strategic thinking. An aspect of this was the care and attention he paid to the long-term personal development of countless individual Communist trade unionists. He also played a key role in the success of the left in the trade unions in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the vital matter of maintaining trade union independence from the state. It was premier Harold Wilson who singled Ramelson out as the ringleader of the “tightly knit group of politically motivated men” in the seamen’s strike of 1966.
Ramelson would frequently and openly comment on way the Party’s influence was far wider than its size by saying that an issue could be prioritised by the Party in the autumn, for it to be union conference agenda’s in the summer, TUC and Labour Party policy by the following autumn and enacted by the spring!
After retirement, he became the Party’s representative on the Prague based World Marxist Review. In the Party’s bitter factional conflicts from the early 1980s, he was a staunch advocate of class politics but remained committed to a strategy of winning the CPGB back, until its dissolution. Ramelson died aged 84 on April 13th 1994.
Guardian April 16th 1994
Some of Bert Ramelson’s Communist Party pamphlets:
`Incomes policy: the great wage freeze trick’ (196- )
`Donovan exposed: a critical analysis of the Report of the Royal Commission on Trade Unions’ (1968)
`Keep the unions free’ (1969)
`Productivity agreements: an exposure of the latest and greatest swindle on the wages front’ (1970)
`Carr's bill and how to kill it: a class analysis’ (1970)
`Heath's war on your wage packet : the latest Tory attack on living standards and trade union rights’ (1973)
`Smash phase III: the Tory fraud exposed’ (1973)
`Social contract: cure-all or con-trick?’ (1974)
`Bury the social contract: the case for an alternative policy’ (1977)
Arthur Reade
A barrister and journalist involved in the early days of the Communist Party from its foundation. Arising from having been involved in distributing Party leaflets to the army with Douglas Springhall, he was the subject of fairly intense security force scrutiny thereafter, despite having left the Party and subsequently standing as a Labour candidate in national elections. There are a number of security force files on him now deposited in the National Archives dating from 1920 to 1951. (Surveillance records later than this have not been released.)
During the Second World War he several times sought employment in various branches of the intelligence services, but was consistently blocked by The Security Service, until he was eventually accepted by the Special Operations Executive. In his early attempts to gain entry to the intelligence services, he enlisted the support of several influential figures to vouch for him.
There is a letter in the archive files, for example, from Harold Stannard of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, enclosing one from Reade, to a certain `Kell’, stating that Reade was "completely cured" of Communism and supporting his appointment. But Reade was repeatedly turned down (eventually enlisting Harold Nicholson MP to speak for him), and the files convey the unease the Security Service felt about continuing to reject his applications when he had so many of the great and good siding with him.
Reade was eventually transferred to the Intelligence Corps, and from there was recruited to Special Operations Executive, where his Balkan experience was seen as being of value. However, when he was sent home with adverse reports by SOE in 1944, he again found his applications (this time to the Political Warfare Executive) being blocked. He eventually returned to the Intelligence Corps in July 1944, and at the end of the war moved on to the Judge Advocate General's department.
When post-war complaints about his treatment came to be considered, an intensive Security Service review of the case admitted that the continual blocking of his requests may not have been justified, but argued that his Communist past made it hard for any other course to have been followed.
Erik Rechnitz
Known mainly as a leading member of the Transport and General Workers' Union, Rechnitz was a long time member of the Communist Party. A Smithfield meat porter, he had once been a professional wrestler. Rechnitz was a dogged debater, often shrouded in clouds of smoke from the pipe typically clenched between his teeth.
Born on February 4th 1915 in Highbury, north London, Rechnitz was the son of Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian empire who arrived in England just two years before the outbreak of the first world war. His father went on to practice as a dentist in the East End. Erik, meanwhile, was educated at local schools in Stoke Newington and, as an 11-year-old, was fund-raising for workers during the 1926 General Strike.
After leaving school, he began training as a metallurgist. However, after the factory where he worked closed, he entered, in 1930, the industry that was to be his life - meat haulage at Smithfield, where he entered as an `offal boy’. Two years later he was in the TGWU. After a time in the Independent Labour Party, he joined the CPGB in 1932 and remained committed throughout his life, joining the CPB. He volunteered for the International Brigade but was not allowed to go as he was the sole family breadwinner.
In the 1930s he dabbled in amateur wrestling as a light-heavyweight and made the Olympic trials. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the `Battling Hungarian’ made professional wrestling appearances. In the second world war, Rechnitz served in the South Wales Borderers, and later with the Parachute Regiment, training as a driver and mechanic. He served in Europe and the Far East.
Back in Smithfield he became a "puller-back" and later a driver. He was active in the TGWU through the years that its general secretary was the vicious right-winger ,Arthur Deakin (1946-55). Although, in common with all Communist Party members, he was unable to hold official office Rechnitz was a key behind the scenes figure both in Smithfield and in the wider union. For example, he was closely involved in the 1958 nine-week strike at Smithfield markets, which involved 58,000 workers.
After the bans on Communists holding office were lifted, he was became a senior lay representative in the T&G. He was at the centre of the 1972 `Pentonville Five’ affair, Chairman of the T&G’s Region 1 (London and the South East) Regional Road Transport Commercial (RTC) trade group committee and the national RTC representative to the TGWU's general executive council from 1968.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Rechnitz was Chair of the influential “Transport Advisory” of the CPGB, its T&G fraction. In the 1980s, he was presented with the T&G’s gold medal, its highest award, by the then General Secretary, Ron Todd. Rechnitz promptly bit on it - he was checking the gold content, he said! He was a long-standing member of Hackney Trades Council, receiving honorary life-membership in 1994. He was its President for along time until the year before he died, on March 16th 2001, aged 86.
Morning Star 20th March 2001, Guardian 24th May 2001
Erik Rechnitz (right) jokingly tests the metal of his union Gold Badge, presented by Ron Todd, the then T&G General Secretary.
Betty Reid
Born in lpswich, the youngest daughter of a former soldier, on May 1st 1915. In her youth she was influenced by a number of mentoring figures, including a socialist history teacher and a local librarian. Initially joined the Labour League of Youth. In the mid-1930s, she met her future husband John Lewjs, the Labour candidate for Great Yarmouth and a former Presbyterian minister, then in his 40s and in the course of embracing Communism. In 1937, they moved to London to work for the Left Book Club. Reid played a particular role in the organization of the local groups in a central organisation department, a role that prefigured her later career in the Party itself.
In the 1930s, she toured the Soviet Union as a member of a group whose numbers were reduced to just three by Moscow's refusal to sanction visas. In the post-war period, she worked for many years in the CPGB Organisation Department in King Street. She was mainly responsible for maintaining vigilance against hostile or dissident elements during the Cold War. In 1950, via Soviet Weekly, Reid found a home-help, only to realise, years later, that her employee was an MI5 plant. The story was widely publicized. Nonetheless, Reid re-established relations with her former friend, and they exchanged cards until her death!
In the late 1960s, with she wrote a pamphlet on the ultra-left in Britain, using her voluminous files of these organizations as source material. Reid continued to work for the Communist party into her 70s. She spent her final years looking after Yvonne Kapp, the biographer of Eleanor Marx, and assisted in the posthumous publication of Kapp's memoirs. Reid died on January 4th 2004, her husband having predeceased her.
Guardian 11th February 2004
Robert Robson
R W Robson was a founder member of the Communist Party, its London District Organiser and head of the Organisation Department during the 1930s and 1940s. He recruited soldiers to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and was the main contact for Communists in the British armed forces. Robson was also placed in charge of co-ordinating and overseeing the activities of the Party’s `professional workers’’ section, organising a national conference of such activists in the winter of 1937.
Much of the publicly available documentation on Robson is in the form of secret service files only released in recent years. The files on Robson cover the period from 1922 to 1953 more than half a lifetime of surveillance.
He had been London District Organiser from 1927 to 1933, and was the head of the Organisation Department in 1935, in which role he played a leading part in recruiting volunteers for the Spanish Civil War. Though his role in the Party seemed mostly to be with organisation, it was suspected that he was also involved with undercover work.
Robson's `mug-shot'
A particular set of files covers the period 1922-35, and includes documents relating to the general investigations of Robson's activities, such as: copies of circulars he issued as London District CPGB organiser; Passport Office forms listing Robson and Bob Stewart (see below), among others, whose passports should not permit them to travel within the Empire; and intercepted phone conversations. There are Special Branch reports of Robson's arrest and conviction in 1931 in connection with charges of receiving stolen goods. (He had been found in possession of a stolen Gestetner duplicator at the Party offices!)
1931 newspaper report on Robson
The files from 1935 to 1953 include detailed surveillance reports of Robson's activities and phone conversations, these are especially and significantly detailed and assiduous in the period March to August 1942. Reports focused on his separation from his wife and subsequent cohabitation with one Eireen Potter, who was passed off as Mrs Robson. Presumably, this was seen as a chink in Robson's otherwise steely armour as a Communist.
He fell ill with tuberculosis during the Second World War, and when his common law `wife' (and supposedly, but improbably, Robson himself - he may have simply been humouring her) turned to religion the Security Service considered approaching him for an interview, but this was never followed up. So this is an example of a potential turncoat spotted (criminal conviction, health scares, religious wife, scandalous affair) who was not considered worthy of the danger of a serious attempt to recruit him.
Even so, the security forces kept up their long-term watch on him, even when he convalesced from tuberculosis in Somerset in 1949/50. Robson was now a severely ill man with little active role in party affairs, but the government feared the high regard for Robson’s opinion in the Party and sought to `turn’ him.
Agents hoped the Reverend DJ Cockle, the vicar of Timberscombe in Somerset, where the Robsons were staying, would convince Robson, now close to death to renounce Communism and to convert to Christianity. They had earlier ruled out the help of Robson’s local Hampstead vicar, Father EF Bailey, of All Saints Church, because he was less willing to co-operate. A formerly top-secret 250-document file details how the Rev Cockle had befriended Robson in 1949.
Robson’s common-law wife, Eileen Potter, was a regular at the Revd Cockle’s services, despite Robson’s scepticism. She told the vicar she wished to make amends for having lived with Robson unmarried and said she hoped Robson would also convert to Christianity.
Her conversion, combined with Robson’s ailing health and his worry about what would happen to his wife if he were interned due to the Cold War might help the Revd Cockle convince him to defect, MI5 hoped. The security body described his possible defection as “a prize of the first magnitude”, but spy chiefs realised it was unlikely. In a stark document weighing up the chance of his betrayal, Robson is described as having a “twisted character”, which would allow him to attend church to appease his wife while remaining, at heart, a Communist.
Nevertheless, it was decided to use the Revd Cockle. In secretly recorded conversations over tea and biscuits, the vicar put the case for religion while Robson spoke about his involvement in Communism.
A letter Robson wrote to the Revd Cockle from Hampstead makes it clear the vicar had broached the subject by asking for advice on a book about the difficulties between Communism and Christianity. Robson told him there was “no essential conflict” between the two and added: “I think God’s ends are being realised in the present turmoil, awful as it is, and that men are on the threshold of a wonderful new era.”
The Revd Cockle seems to have felt guilty about his undercover work. He told Somerset police, who were working with MI5, that he did not want to get involved in politics and said his influence could only be spiritual – although agents remained convinced he would pass on any “treasonous” material. The vicar was “relieved” that Robson had learnt, via Father Bailey, that police were making inquiries about his Communist background. It odes not seem that the plot to turn Robson ever had any chance of success.
In 1951, Robson wrote a scathing criticism of Douglas Hyde, a former Communist Party comrade who had joined the Roman Catholic church and written a book on his former life called `I Believed’. Hyde had co-operated with MI5. Robson wrote: “Hyde has rejected the substance and embraced the shadow. He will not persuade many to join him. “They not only believe, they know.” But the whole scam against Robson failed since the vicar died in 1951 before the attempted conversion could be completed.
Beyond these stupid games, which say little about Robson’s real threat to the nation’s security and more about the culture of high jinks and rooted anti-radicalism of the elite security forces, the majority of the remaining documents in the National Archive are unrevealing. One criticises his wife’s intelligence and says she “dresses poorly”. Others detail bickering within the Communist Party, and Robson’s trivial run-ins with the law in earlier life.
Sources:
National Archives
http://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/archive/n021003_7.htm
George Renshaw
A pioneer member of the Communist Party and an active member of the Minority Movement, Renshaw produced such papers as the Railway Vigilant and the Busman's Punch. For many years, he was on the industrial staff of the Daily Worker. His family has deposited the originals of associated material at the Warwick Modern Records Centre.
Edgell Rickword
John Edgell Rickword (October 22, 1898 - March 15, 1982) was an English poet and critic, and journalist and literary editor. He became one of the leading communist intellectuals active in the 1930s.
He was born in Colchester, Essex. He served as an officer in the British Army in World War I, being awarded a Military Cross. He was a published war poet. He went up to the University of Oxford in 1919, (where he knew Edmund Blunden, Vivian de Sola Pinto, A. E. Coppard, Louis Golding, and Alan Porter), staying only four terms reading French literature, and leaving when he married. He did, though, appear the Oxford Poetry 1921 anthology, with Blunden, Golding, Porter, Robert Graves, Richard Hughes, and Frank Prewett.
He then took up literary work in London. He reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement, which led to his celebrated review of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. J. C. Squire published him in the London Mercury, and Desmond MacCarthy as literary editor of the New Statesman gave him work. He started the Calendar of Modern Letters literary review, now highly regarded, in March 1925. It lasted until July 1927, assisted by Douglas Garman and then Bertram Higgins, and contributions from his cousin C. H. Rickword. The Scrutinies books of collected pieces from it was a great success. Its undoubted influence as a precursor of later criticism was very marked in the early days of Scrutiny, the magazine founded a few years later by F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis. Rickword also did write for that publication.
He joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s, and became increasingly active in political work during the period of the Spanish Civil War; while still writing poetry. He was friendly with Randall Swingler, the 'official' poetry voice of the Party, and with Jack Lindsay, his only real rival as a theoretician. He was closely connected with the leading cultural figures on the hard Left, such as Mulk Raj Anand, Ralph Fox, Julius Lipton, A. L. Morton, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Alick West. At that time he was a co-founder of the Left Review, which he edited.
Later he became Editor of Our Time, the Communist review, from 1944 to 1947, working with David Holbrook.
Edgell's publications include:
`Behind the Eyes' (1921) poems
`Rimbaud: The Boy and the Poet' (1924)
`Invocation to Angels' (1928) poems
`Scrutinies By Various Writers' (1928) editor
`Scrutinies - Volume II' (1931) editor
`Love One Another' (1929)
`Poet Under Saturn: The Tragedy of Verlaine by Marcel Coulon' (1932) translator
`A handbook of freedom: a record of English democracy through twelve centuries' (1939) co-editor with Jack Lindsay
`Collected Poems' (1947)
`Radical Squibs and Loyal Ripostes: a collection of satirical pamphlets of the Regency period 1819-1821' (1971) editor
`Essays and Opinions Volume 1: 1921-31' (1974) edited by Alan Young
`Literature and Society: Essays and Opinions Vol.2 1931-1978' (1978)
`Twittingpan and Some Others' (1981) poems
`Fifty Poems: A Selection by Edgell Rickword'
Percy Riley
Born in 1920, and brought up in early life in Leeds, he was an illegitimate child. After his uncle had sought a legal order to have him made a ward of court on the fallacious grounds that his mother could not properly take care of him, he was sent to an approved school at the age of six where he remained until he was fourteen. He was to return to live with his mother and his stepfather in Goldthorpe mining village when he was 17. But left to find work and was able to obtain a job with London Transport, where he stayed until the outbreak of war.
He joined the Communist Party in 1940, which he remained a member of all his life, but had been active in the 1930s with Communists in London in action against the BUF. Unable to join the armed forces due to a lung condition, he was placed back in Yorkshire in a sanatorium. Eventually, he came into contact with the then South Yorkshire coalfield Communist Party organiser, Johnny Mason. He obtained work at the Royal Ordnance factory in Maltby, joining the Maltby Party branch and lodging with the Sheffield United footballer, Harry Draper, who was a Party member. Riley got married locally and became the full-time YCL organiser in Sheffield.
One task the YCL undertook was the mobilisation of thousands of Yorkshire miners to spend a week’s holiday in harvest camps in Bedfordshire. YCLers also took part and made a fortune for their organisation this way. On one occasion, the miners were paid for pea picking and, whilst they enjoined the change of scene and regarded the experience as a holiday, they stubbornly and promptly went on strike when they discovered that the Bedfordshire agricultural rate was not equivalent to the Yorkshire rate! Percy was thrown out of the camp at four in the morning, for encouraging the miners in this.
In 1946, he became the first Communist councillor in South Yorkshire, when he was elected in Thurnscoe in Hickleton village. This service was truncated after three years, as he and a group of 12 rebel Labour councillors were surcharged by a Labour government for `over-spending’ on house building and barred from standing for five years and declared bankrupts, Percy lost all his worldly possessions. Seemingly, the offence concerned the timing of a retrospective payment regarding the building of 500 homes. After the ban had expired, Percy stood again many times but it was during the Cold War and he was never again successful.
He was involved in organising the collection of 50,000 signatures for the Stockholm Peace Appeal and was one of the key figures in the attempted convening of the World Peace Congress in Sheffield. When the Labour Government refused visas to foreign guests to attend, Percy attended the reconvened Congress in Warsaw in November 1952. He had applied for permission to be released from his employers, unpaid, for the period needed. This was at first refused and a campaign to force them ensued by means of a petition. The Secretary of the Dearne Labour Party, a moderate and Catholic councillor, found himself censured for being a “Communist stooge” by the Labour hierarchy and local press when he expressed his support and belief in the rights of individuals to hold controversial opinions.
During this period, Percy and Frank Watters, by now South Yorkshire coalfield organiser for the Party, became great friends and were especially close to a fellow Communist, Bill Blessed, father of the subsequently famous actor, Brian, who was himself to suffer prejudice over these associations when called up for National Service.
By 1954, Percy worked in a small engineering factory in Doncaster but then went via the Labour Exchange to a secretarial school for one year. He then found work as a door to door commission salesman for Betterware and excelled in this, becoming branch manager for Barnsley. He continued to be active in the Party as a member of the Yorkshire District Committee and was involved in mobilising Tenants’ Association struggles against rent increases in the 1960s, especially in campaigns against rises for NCB houses. So valued was his work in this area, when the Yorkshire NUM met Alf Robens, NCB chair, over the issue and he refused to allow Percy access to the meeting since he was not in the NUM, the entire delegation refused to enter without him.
All this time, he had sought to get work with the NCB and had been cold-shouldered. But he was able to get a start working with diesel fitters in 1970, during a period when the personnel manager was off work ill! He became an NUM activist and within a year was on its branch committee. Percy was heavily involved in the 1970 and 1972 miners’ strikes and was part of the Yorkshire NUM contingent at the celebrated Saltley Gate picketing. During this period he took to recording with tape and camera picket line activity, a practice he continued for the rest of his life.
In 1975, he moved to Sheffield when he married for the second time, to Doris Askham, subsequently a Labour councillor –as he put it a blow for “Labour-Communist unity”! Percy joined the Heeley branch of the Party and was active in local campaigns and trades council work. He was successively press officer, vice-chair and then chair of the Sheffield Tenants Federation. Out of employment in the mining industry due to this move, he was able to get work at the NCB Fence Workshops in 1977. He was a constant presence at the Grunwick picket line, as part of the Yorkshire NUM delegation and won election to the Yorkshire Area Council of the NUM, a key position and was involved – as he had been over the years, albeit sometimes from the sidelines - in all the major debates and work that finally shifted both the Yorkshire Area and then the National Miners Union firmly to the Left.
He was still a member of the Area Council and engaged in debates over strategy to adopt in the coming struggle during the build up to the miners’ strike of 1984-5 but ill-health (he went down with pneumonia) forced his early retirement just before the strike began. Nonetheless, he devoted himself in the next year full time to organising solidarity work in a vast range of ways. He became such a fixture at the permanent street collection pitch in Sheffield that the local paper published a cartoon depicting him being `knighted’ by `King’ Arthur Scargill!
In the months following the end of the strike, Percy wrote a short memoir of his life, which was posthumously published. Never a robust man, Percy virtually exhausted himself and brought on severe ill-heath in his last year of life after a lifetime of devotion to the struggle for working class rights. He died on 3rd January 1986 after being seriously ill for a long time; a staggering 800 people attended his funeral.
Sources: Percy Riley “The life of Riley” Yorkshire Arts Circus (1986); cuttings from local press January 16th 1952 from papers of Frank Watters, GS personal knowledge.
Charles Ringrose
Born on September 24th 1908 in North London, Ringrose was the son of a bus conductor. In the 1930s, he worked for a charity for down-and-outs, which led him into the Communist Party. He was further politicised by army service during the war in the Royal Engineers. He became a sergeant and took part in the D-Day invasion.
A good amateur violinist and bass singer, he became involved in the Workers Music Association. In August 1951, as Chair of the WEA, he travelled with 300 young progressives en route to the East Berlin youth Festival. In the American zone of occupied Austria, they encountered problems with the hostile military, which threw the entire group off the train at Innsbruck, making them sleep out in the open on the railway line. The US troops carried fixed bayonets and forced the group to move with weapons jammed into their backs. Some began hitting some of the youngsters with rifle butts. Austrian progressive organisations helped most eventually get to Berlin.
Charles Ringrose
Ringrose became a full time WEA organiser, as such he spotted that the copyright of “Poor Paddy Works on the Railway”, recorded as a B-side to Seven Drunken Nights by the Dubliners. He obtained substantial royalties for the organisation and thus saved it from demise at a difficult time. From 1962 to 1974, he was a member of the London Co-operative Society’s Education Committee. In 1966, he was initiated the “Let’s Make a Film” festival, which encouraged schools to do just that. It began with nine entries and today involves thousands. At one point he reported on football matches for the Daily Worker and Morning Star.
He was secretary of the British-Hungarian Friendship Society from January 1952 to its dissolution in December 1986, receiving an honour for this work from the Hungarian government in 1980. Ringrose was married for forty years to a Hungarian from Romanian Transylvanian, Ghizela (Gizi) Schreiber, who died a year before him. Ringrose died on October 12th 1997, aged 89.
T.L Robb
Active in trade unions from 1931, Robb was a member of the Yorkshire District of the Communist Party from 1948 and was also the Chair of the West Riding Area Communist Party. He stood as the Communist Party parliamentary candidate for Shipley at the 1950 general election.
Marion Robertson
Born in 1914, Marion was chair of Glasgow and West of Scotland SOGAT and became Scotswoman of the year in 1989. A lifelong Communist, she died in 2007.
Alec `Spike’ Robson
Robson was born in 1895, one of 11 children, to a mining family. He began himself in the Gambois pit, near Blyth, aged only 11 years, He was a trapper boy, regulating the flow of air by opening and closing doors and allowing the pony-pulled tubs of coal came up, much harder work than it sounds especially when doing the then standard ten hour day.
Even at the young age of 15, he was a member of the Northumberland Miners’ Association and was on strike in the successful 1910 national dispute for an eight hour day.
At the age of 16, he was invited to join a boxing booth at Blyth market and went on to tour county fairs and the boxing for a living. He became known as “Spike Robson of Shields”. In 1912, he joined the SS Kelvinhead at North Shields as a cabin boy and travelled the world. He began to learn about socialism and working class struggles of the past from an old sailor amongst the crew.
In New York on one sailing he left to once again box professionally and travelled across the USA earning his living this way. He joined the army in 1915, was wounded in battle in France twice and was decorated with the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Military Medal after three years in the trenches. Demobbed in 1919, he married his childhood sweetheart, settled back in the north-east of England and fathered seven children.
He signed on as a stoker on a White Star liner in 1919, not realising that the cargo was 700 British troops bound for Archangel and Murmansk, an invasion force designed to undermine the young Soviet republic. Once there, Robson fraternised with Red Guards and they were especially taken with his showing them his seamen’s union membership book. Once returned to Britain, the first thing he did was to take part in the Hands off Russia movement and, in 1922, he joined the Communist Party, which he was to remain a member of for the rest of his life. He built the first Communist Party branch in North Shields.
Spike was one of seven men who served prison sentences for organising demonstrations of the unemployed in North Shields on October 5th 1932. A lobby of the Public Assistance Committee meeting that followed the national introduction of the Means Test and severe cuts in benefits.
Over the next few decades, he continued as a merchant seaman, organising ship’s committees on whatever vessel he happened to be on. On his many runs to a wide variety of ports in the world, some political action would always ensure. The painting of slogans on ships from Nazi Germany, the smuggling of anti-fascist propaganda and the organisation of a protest march against Italian ships bound for their war against Abyssinia and the boycotting by merchant seamen of ship lying at Blyth bound for Japan with scrap iron, in protest at their war in China. He was fined £2 – then a considerable sum – for his part in the latter.
Outward bound from Boston in December 1936, he discovered that the ship he was on had a contract to carry nitrate, an essential component of explosives, to Seville, by now General Franco’s headquarters as he propagated the civil war in Spain. The crew held a sit-down strike and refused to sail for three weeks. Then the British consul arrived and the crew were deported to Britain. Charges were levelled at them in Liverpool, again a £2 fine was imposed but an appeal was won. The case ended up in the High Court and D N Pritt defended to crew, Robson defended himself. The case was dismissed and all costs awarded against the shipping line.
In 1939, Robson was able to join the “T124x” section of the Royal Navy, a special section for merchant seamen manning mine sweepers and layers, auxiliary ships and landing craft. A notable occasion was when he was on a landing craft dropping supplies to the Yugoslavian partisans in 1943. For four months, he was based in Malta teaching partisans to use Mills’ bombs. Then active service operations meant that he was engaged in the regular supplying to and relieving the wounded from Tito’s forces along the coastline of Yugoslavia itself.
In 1947, he returned to the Merchant Navy and was elected to the Executive Committee of the National Union of Seamen. He was the first Communist to serve in that capacity and this was a remarkable achievement given that the Cold War had just begun to bite. During a dispute in 1956, when Robson was signed on to a ore carrier on the St Lawrence River, the NUS wouldn’t agree to the demands of the British crew that Canadian rates of pay should apply, an important demand since these were 100% more than British rates. The crew decided to approach the Seafarers’ International Union for membership, so as to better prosecute the claim. In the end, nothing less than a Royal Commission was established to resolve the Anglo-Canadian problem and this involved flying 40 persons from the NUS and the British Shipping Federation, along with a host of legal advisors!
His seafaring days began to fade in the 1960s and Spike lived to fairly ripe old age, dying in 1979 and remaining a committed member of the Communist Party to the end.
Source: “Spike (Alec `Spike’ Robson 1895-1979) Class Fighter” North Tyneside TUC (1987)
Gertie Roche
Born on June 9th 1912, Gertie Roche began work in the clothing industry in the 1920s, aged 16 she was employed at Montague Burton’s huge factory in Leeds. After a big strike in 1936, she joined the Communist Party. After an early unhappy marriage, she married Jim Roche, a fellow clothing worker who became a leading full-time worker in the Yorkshire District Communist Party after the war.
Gertie was active in the National Assembly of Women from 1951, which was especially associated for resistance to the Cold War and US aggression. This became a personal concern when he son by a previous marriage, David, was called up during the Korean War. Gertie’s activism sharpened further and she became the Yorkshire District Women’s Organiser, setting up groups in mining and textile towns.
Jim Roche resigned from the Communist Party after Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin but Gertie stayed on until November of that year, when she was expelled. Both were active supporters of New Reasoner and close to EP Thompson and his wife, Dorothy. In later years, Gertie became a shop steward at Colliers’ clothing factory; she was associated with the mass walkout of Leeds’ women textile workers of 1970. Later still, she was a key figure in the feminist movement. Jim Roche died in 1992 and Gertie passed away on June 3rd 1997, aged 84.
Guardian June 9th 1997
Esmond Romilly
The nephew of Winston Churchill, Romilly was born in 1918. Educated at Wellington College he caused a stir when he declared he was a pacifist and with his brother, Giles Romilly, refused to join the Officer Training Corps.
The brothers also distributed communist leaflets in the school and began publishing a left-wing journal, Out of Bounds: Public Schools' Journal Against Fascism, Militarism and Reaction. In the first issue Romilly stated that the journal would "openly champion the forces of progress against the forces of progress against the forces of reaction on every front, from compulsory military training to propagandist teaching." The journal soon had a circulation of over 3,000 copies.
In 1934 the Daily Mail wrote an article about the activities of the Romilly brothers under the headline: "Red Menace in Public Schools! Moscow Attempts to Corrupt Boys". Soon afterwards the fifteen run away from school and went to work for a Communist bookshop in London. He also established a centre for other boys who had run away or had been expelled from public schools.
Romilly was eventually arrested and after his mother had told the judge that he was uncontrollable he was sentenced to a six-week term in a Remand Home for delinquent boys. On his release Romilly joined forces to publish the book Out of Bounds: The Education of Giles and Esmond Romilly (1935). The book received good reviews and the Observer commented on its "considerable intelligence, modesty, and tolerance, a series of clear, humorous, and lively pictures of schools, boys, masters and parents"
On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War Romilly joined the International Brigades. As the British Battalion had not yet been formed Romilly and 15 other Englishmen were attached to the German Thaelmann Battalion. Romilly fought in the defence of Madrid but by December 1936 all but two of the English group had been killed or seriously wounded. The following month, suffering from dysentery, he was sent home.
In February 1937 Romilly returned to Spain as a journalist with the News Chronicle. His girlfriend, Jessica Mitford, went with him and they married in June 1937. While on honeymoon Romilly wrote Boadilla, an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.
When Romilly returned to England he found work as a copywriter for a small advertising agency in London, whereas Jessica was employed in market research. Along with his wife Romilly became involved in the struggle against the British Union of Fascists.
In 1939 Mitford and Romilly went to the United States. On the outbreak of the Second World War Romilly went to Canada and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but was killed in November 1941 during a bombing raid over Nazi Germany.
Idris Rose
Rose first stood as a Communist candidate for the council in Trowbridge, Wiltshire in 1946, In 1947 his small local branch of the Communist Party (it had 13 members) produced a regular newsletter “The Trowbridge Leader”. Despite being labelled a “red menace “ and “Moscow missionary” Rose had, by 1958, built his vote up to a very respectable 1,154. Idris was finally elected a Communist councillor for Trowbridge Urban District Council in 1961.
Michael Walker
Jean Ross
Jean Ross has been immortalised by a caractiture of herself in Christopher Isherwood’s book `Goodbye to Berlin’; first published by the Hogarth Press in 1937. Being set in early 1930s Berlin, the backdrop is the rise to power of the Nazi party and, accordingly, Isherwood's novel captures the excesses of Weimar Germany. "Divine decadence" is the self-proclaimed lifestyle of his unforgettable character, Sally Bowles, "one of those individuals whom respectable society shuns in horror".
Only after her death in 1973 was Isherwood prepared to reveal that the inspiration for Sally came from Isherwood's friend Jean Ross, then a nineteen year old nightclub singer, who shared a lodging house with him in 1931. Jean gave him permission to use her experiences in Berlin, but she went to considerable lengths in her life to avoid public identification with Sally Bowles.
The character has now assumed a self-dynamic, being transformed by each successive representation on stage or screen. The novel was the basis for a 1951 stage play, "I Am A Camera" and a hit Broadway musical in the 1960's. In 1972, Bob Fosse directed and choreographed the now highly famous film version, "Cabaret", winner of eight Academy Awards.
Jean was by far more talented than the Sally Bowles character, having worked as a serious actress in her youth before going to Berlin and then writing for a living for a time. Her stepson Alexander Cockburn, in his on-line site providing his musings, `Counterpunch’, recalls that she was “not only very beautiful, Jean was gentle, highly intelligent and cultured, as well as being very elegant in behaviour and dress.” Jean Ross was thus “not a bit like the vulgar vamp displayed by Lisa Minnelli”!!
It may be wondered how this could be the case. Jean's sense of self-esteem and lack of sexual and other inhibitions as a woman was attractive to Isherwood but, since he was then hiding his homosexuality, he turned his observation of this extraordinary woman into a narrower one, being unable to countenance a woman as liberated and talented as Jean. Hollywood merely honed the stereotype he had created into a grotesque. Even so, the blindingly attractive personality in epic times that was felt about Jean by those that knew her still came through.
Maintaining her unconventionality, around 1935-6, she shared digs with Bill Carritt when she was `Peter Porcupine’, the Daily Worker’s film critic. No doubt this is where she met and later married Claud Cockburn [see separate entry], when he was famous as Frank Pitcairn of the Daily Worker.
The marriage later foundered and Cockburn both left the Daily Worker and moved, in 1947, to Ireland to write and remarry, but they produced a daughter, Sarah Caudwell Cockburn. As Sarah Caudwell (a surname to conjure with) became a respected writer of quality detective novels in the 1970s. (The Shortest Way to Hades, The Sirens Sang of Murder, Thus Was Adonis Murdered and, posthumously, The Sibyl in Her Grave.) Before she turned to crime Sarah was a successful barrister, with the extraordinary habit of being an enthusiastic pipe smoker.
Claud’s son by his next marriage, Alexander Cockburn, recalls that his half-sister had felt so strongly about Isherwood's portrayal of her mother that she wrote a piece about it in the New Statesman. Jean, she wrote, never liked `Goodbye to Berlin’, nor felt a sense of identity with the character of Sally Bowles, which in many respects she thought more closely modelled on one of Isherwood's male friends!
Sarah's thought Isherwood so wedded to convention that he “follows it loyally. There is nothing in his portrait of Sally to suggest that she might have had any genuine ability as an actress, still less as a writer”. Jean had been talented enough an actress to be cast as Anitra in Max Reinhardt's production of Henrik Ibsen’s `Peer Gynt’, with incidental music composed by Edvard Grieg. Anitra is the daughter of a Bedouin chief and this is a difficult dance and acting role. Sarah also pints out that her mother was able to “earn her living, not long afterwards, as a scenario-writer and journalist”.
More damagingly, Sarah saw that Isherwood viewed woman as either virtuous or a tart. “So Sally, who is plainly not virtuous, must be a tart. To depend for a living on providing sexual pleasure, whether or not in the context of marriage, seemed to [Jean] the ultimate denial of freedom and emancipation. The idea so deeply repelled her that she simply could not, I think, have been attracted to a man who was rich, or allied herself permanently to anyone less incorrigibly impecunious than my father. She did not see the question as one of personal morality, but as a political one."
Not only did Sarah truly understand her mother, she was herself quite unconventional. As Alexander Cockburn recalls, “she'd light up her pipe, then when waiters rushed up to protest, fling the thing into her handbag, from which smoke would soon begin to wreathe our table…. The pipe smoking did in Sarah in the end, presumably causing the cancer in her oesophagus that killed her at the age of 60 in 2000.
Jean was neither a tart nor a merely a talented review artist, actor and writer. The reality is even more electrifying than Isherwood’s half-rendered pastiche of Jean Ross’s powerful personality. It is strongly believed that her presence in Berlin was occasioned by her being an agent of the Comintern and that her musical theatre occupation was by way of being a sort of cover story.
Of course, in the 1930s, the Comintern had already discovered that a British passport gained you almost certain access to almost anywhere really. Brits were used a lot in Germany, since appeasement meant that it was expected that the UK would eventually ally itself to Nazism. Women, intellectuals with a ruling class background and workers with a trade or relevant reason for travelling (such as a seaman) were commonly used by the Comintern as couriers who took money, false documentation and political instructions in to underground Party workers and brought out samples of leaflets.
Jean spent some time in Spain with Cockburn, when he himself was providing coverage as a diplomatic and foreign correspondent for the Daily Worker and it cannot be discounted that she was still playing a role as an agent of influence for the Comintern. (Cockburn’s first wife, Hope Hale Davis had also been a Communist.)
Her magnetism continued to influence the cultural world. Amazingly, Jean was also the inspiration for the lyrics of the song "These foolish things" by Eric Maschwitz, with music by Cole Porter. Maschwitz, who wrote under the pen name Holt Marvell, was "bewitched" by her! Providing the words here is irresistible, for it must inform our understanding of her:
A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces
An airline ticket to romantic places
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things remind me of you.
A tinkling piano in the next apartment
Those stumblin’ words that told you what my heart meant
A fairground’s painted swings
These foolish things remind me of you.
You came, you saw, you conquered me
When you did that to me
I knew somehow this had to be.
The winds of March that make my heart a dancer
A telephone that rings but who’s to answer?
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things remind me of you.
The song originated in 1930s British revue and was a staple of the performances of Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Maschwitz wrote the screenplays of several successful films in the 1930s and 40s, but is best remembered for his lyrics to popular songs such as A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.
In the post war period, Jean was close to leading Communist, Joe Bent (see separate entry). At one point, she lived off the Walworth Rd in Southwark and it is clear that she remained a life-long Communist.
Jean’s late life has become clouded by obscurity. It has been suggested that she may have been resident in the "Jack Jones’" house in Peckham. This was at the time a new residential home for the elderly named after Jack and opened by him. Whether this reflected an old link with Evelyn Taylor (later Jones), Jack’s wife, who has also been linked with the Comintern as a courier from 1934 is pure speculation. Certainly, Evelyn had been heavily involved in Communist Party activities, such as the Kinder Scout mass trespass of 1932, before she had met her future husband.
Jean is possibly the Jean Iris Cockburn who is registered as having died in Richmond in 1973 aged 62 and she may be the Jean Ross registered as being born in Cardiff 1911 but confirmation is still uncertain.
__________
Special thanks to Dick Maunders for initiating the line of enquiry and producing much information about Jean Ross.
Sources: Dick Mauders, Counterpunch Feb 22 2001;
http://www.openwriting.com/archives/2007/03/these_foolish_t_1.php
Benny Rothman
Born on June 1st 1911, Bernard (Benny) Rothman was the middle son of five children of Romanian Jewish parents, who came to Britain at the turn of the century. His father ran a hardware stall at Glossop and Shaw markets but the family was so poor that young Benny had to leave Manchester’s High School, for which he had won a scholarship, at the age of 14 when an errand boy’s job came up.
Rothaman was the prime mover behind the historic mass trespass of Kinder Scout, despite being only 20 years old. In the summer of 1925, entirely on his own, he cycled to North Wales and climbed Snowdon. It was the start of a life-long commitment to the outdoors.
In 1928, he was an apprentice in the motor trade in Deansgate, Manchester, when he joined the YCL and became a regular on their organised weekend camps on the Derbyshire moors, held under the `respectable’ name of the British Workers Sports Federation. A section of the latter, on a ramble being led by Rothman, found themselves threatened by a group of keepers at Yellowslacks Brook near Rowath.
There was tradition of unrestrained violence towards small groups of working class interlopers. Rothman’s group of six or seven, mostly factory lads, mused over the possibility of there having been a shop full of apprentices and the concept of a mass trespass was born.
It took place in fact on April 24th 1932, following a rally at the quarry on Kinder Road, Hayfield, where a plaque now commemorates it. Rothman stepped in at the last minute as main speaker, when the intended incumbent took fright at the sight of 200 police. 500 ramblers then marched on the highest hill in the Peak District. There was then no right of public access.
A drunken keeper sprained an ankle whist assaulting a rambler and a noisy mêlée ensued. Police and keepers fell over themselves to perjure themselves in the resulting trial of five ramblers. The judge was beside himself with the fact that three of the defendants were obviously Jewish and that they were all so relaxed about being associated with the Communist literature that was sold on the trespass. It was as if being of East European origin was in itself a crime!
After four months in Leicester jail, Benny went to Burnley, to help out with the No Moor Looms dispute. In 1933, he returned to Manchester to work for a comrade who had a small garage in Cheetham. He was involved in the campaign against the 1933 bill to restrict camping to only officially approved sites. He was violently ejected from the hall at Belle Vue, along with Eveline Taylor (later Jack Jones’ wife), protesting against Oswald Mosley.
Shortly before the war, he found work at A V Roe’s, the aircraft factory, but he was victimised due to his politics and then worked at Metropolitan Vickers, in Trafford Park and which had a large Communist Party branch. He volunteered as an ambulance driver for the International Brigade in Spain but was rejected for the army in the Second World War, being in a reserved occupation. For thirty years after 1945, he was a dedicated trade union activist in the Manchester area.
In retirement, he campaigned against restrictive legislation on access to the countryside, publishing an account of the Trespass on its 50th anniversary and carving out a significant voice for himself in the media. He was effective in such a role by winning concessions in the water privatisation bill. Benny Rothman died, aged 90, on 23rd January 2002.
Benny Rothman
Guardian January 25th 2002
Andrew Rothstein (and Theodore Rothstein)
Andrew Rothstein, who was to became a significant figure in British Communism, was born in London on 26th September 1898 to Jewish Russian political emigrants. His subsequent life was always tinged by the identity of his father, Theodore Aaronovitch Rothstein (1871–1953). He had been obliged to emigrate from Russia for political reasons and, from 1890, settled in Britain for the next 30 years.
Theodore joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1895, being very much part of its left wing; in 1901, he also joined the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) as a British based member. The RSDLP would split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and Rothstein would support the Bolsheviks all the way. Lenin frequently visited Rothstein and his family on his own visits to London, as in 1905.
The SDF leader, H M Hyndman, was acutely disturbed by the election to the SDF executive in 1900 of Theodore Rothstein. For he and Zelda Kahan, who was also of Russian-Jewish origin, led the opposition inside the SDF to Hyndman's growing support for British militarism arising from his mistrust of German imperial ambitions, which was tinged by more than a whiff of ant-semitism.
Theodore Rothstein supported the unity process that led to the formation in 1911, by a merger between a number of socialist groups and the SDF (which had become the Social Democratic Party in 1907) to create the British Socialist Party. Both the young Andrew and his father were strongly against the 1914-18 war, even though Theodore Rothstein was working for the Foreign Office and the War Office as a Russian translator.
He was decisive in the move to oust the Hyndman national chauvinist clique in the BSP in 1916 and also took part in founding of the Communist Party. But he partly returned to Russia in 1920 and then increasingly became more involved in the new Russia to the extent that he remained there permanently. From 1921 to 1930 he was engaged in diplomatic work, starting with being the Soviet representative in Iran in 1921. He became Director of the Institute of World Economy and World Politics and, from 1939, was an Academician, receiving the Order of Lenin. Theodore also wrote a number of significant books, he wrote on Egypt, and his `From Chartism to Labourism’ (1929) was a pioneering work on British labour and trade union history.
After winning a London County Council scholarship, Andrew Rothstein studied History at Oxford and served in the Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and Hampshire Yeomanry from 1917-19. He was a corporal when he discovered that his unit was about to be sent to Archangel, the Russian port where British troops had been sent to assist the Tsarist forces resistance to the new Soviet government, led by the Bolsheviks. Only one soldier volunteered to go to Russia, the rest stuck with Rothstein. This was the first of many rebellions and mutinies in the British Army against the intervention in Russia, involving up to 30,000 troops at its height, the history of which was later documented by Andrew Rothstein in his “Soldiers’ Strikes of 1919”.
Andrew Rothstein was a foundation member of Communist Party in 1920 and was the man who recruited Tom Wintringham (see separate entry) to the Communist cause. Rothstein met Sylvia Pankhurst on several occasions and said that he thought her “energetic and sincere but in a one-sided way … She always had a bunch of devoted women around her but often would think nothing of intercepting propaganda material being brought for my father and printing them as articles in her own paper. She was an unscrupulous woman.” At the suggestion of the Comintern, a second British Unity Congress was held, with Pankhurst's group participating. Although a merger ensued, Rothstein recalled events as that "she broke away again after about three months".
When Andrew Rothstein returned to Oxford, he found that he had been deprived of an army grant to assist his return to university and was thus unable to continue in post¬graduate research. A stern letter from the Master and Fellows at Balliol announced that he must leave immediately. Twenty years later, when he met a former junior dean from those days, who told him that the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon had personally intervened in his case. Rothstein recalled: "He told me a letter was read out from Curzon, which said that I was a very dangerous Communist and must not be allowed to stay.”
On completing his university education in 1921, he became the London correspondent of ROSTA (later TASS), the Soviet news agency. He regularly wrote articles for the Party, the labour movement, and as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency as “C M Roebuck”. At the 8th Congress of the Party, he was elected to the EC and politburo but removed from the latter after six years membership when the 11th Congress in December 1929 took the Party on a left turn. Rothstein was "utterly against” the new line but found himself appointed as deputy head of the Anglo-American department of the Red International of Labour Unions and served in the post for 18 months, based in Moscow.
From 1920 to 1945, he was press officer to the first Soviet mission in Britain, and then correspondent for the Soviet press agency TASS, in London, Geneva and elsewhere. He became an authority on Soviet history, economy, institutions and foreign relations and began to publish widely: e.g. `The Soviet Constitution’ (1923), `Problems of Peace’ (essays on Soviet foreign policy, 1936-8), `Workers in the Soviet Union’ (1942), `Man and Plan in the Soviet Economy’ (1948).
Andrew Rothstein was President of the Foreign Press Association, from 1943-50 and, after the war, was the London correspondent of Czechoslovakian trade union paper, `Prace’, a post he held until 1970. From 1946, he lectured at London University's School of Slavonic and East European Studies but was dismissed on spurious grounds in 1950 in an affair that had the feel of a McCarthyite purge about it. In this period, published `A history of the USSR’ (1950) and `Peaceful Coexistence’ (1955). He translated many Marxist texts from the Russian into English; for example, Plekhanov’s `In defence of materialism’ and segments of Lenin’s Collected Works, such as, for the 4th English edition (1963), a report on the meeting of the editorial board of the journal `Proletary’ in 1909.
Rothstein was awarded a Soviet pension in 1970 and, after formal retirement, was chair of the Marx Memorial Library and vice-chair of the British-Soviet Friendship Society. He also wrote and published widely; there was an account of the origins and background of the building that houses the Marx Memorial Library, `A house on Clerkenwell Green’ (1972), and material that he had first hand knowledge of: `When Britain Invaded Soviet Russia: the Consul Who Rebelled’ (1979) and `The Soldier's Strikes of 1919’ (1980).
A member of the Communist Party all his days, he was a critic of the drive to revisionism in the CPGB of the 1980s and wrote, with Robin Page Arnot (see entry), another veteran Communist, a piece entitled “The British Communist Party and Euro-Communism” for the CP USA’s `Political Affairs’, published in October 1985, which described the manufactured crisis in British Communism. He was proud to be the recipient of card number one of the re-established Communist Party of Britain in 1988. His last published article was for the CPB’s `Communist Review’, on `British Communists and the Comintern 1919-1929’, printed in the summer of 1991 and he died on September 22nd in 1994, aged 95.
Morning Star September 29th 1988 and other sources
Bill Rounce
Rounce had been elected as a Labour Councillor for Jarrow, when he defected to the Communist Party in 1946, sitting for the rest of his term as one of the Party’s approximately 250 councillors it then had.
Cliff Rowe
Rowe was a major artist of the 1930s, his work reflected his concern to represent industry and working life. The People's History Museum holds the major part of Cliff Rowe's work. The National Railway Museum, York, the Science Museum, London, and the Tate Gallery, London, hold others.
Born in Wimbledon, Rowe studied at Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal College of Art. By 1931, he was making designs for Communist Party publications. Following eighteen months of travel and design work in the Soviet Union, Rowe returned to England and in 1934 helped establish the Artists' International Association, which eventually grew to about 900 strong. Its work included helping refugees from Hitler's Germany and providing medical aid to the British International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.
From 1945, Rowe's work included publicity commissions from the Attlee Labour government and trade unions, designs for the 1951 Festival of Britain, commercial mural design, exhibition design and text book illustration.
The major part of Rowe's work however consists of large oil paintings, and the Tolpuddle Martyrs and General Strike murals commissioned by the Electrical Trades Union, then led by Communists.
Large scale and powerful, his oils are icons to the worker and stress the social value of labour, whilst his murals depict key struggles in the history of organized labour.
Ben Rubner
Born on September 30th 1921, the youngest of three sons of a Jewish family, Ben Rubner was born and bred in London’s east end. He followed the family trade of furniture making and started his working life as a cabinet maker. Joining the Communist Party in his twenties, he was a leading activist in the National Union of Furniture and Timber Operatives. Elected a full-time official in January 1959, from then on he never lost re-election until his retirement.
During his early days as a full-time official, he was noted for his regular reports in the union journal on the work and need for 100% shop floor organisation and membership. He was elected a national officer of NUFTO in February 1963 and, in that capacity, led a major campaign in the furniture making industry to rebut an employers’ offensive on pay and conditions.
A long-term member of the Communist Party, in 1964, he flew to Vietnam as a part of a delegation pledged to campaign against the burgeoning war there. From this came the seeds of the British anti-war movement of the 1960s and Rubner’s role in alerting the labour and progressive movement to the savagery and injustice of this war was critical from the start.
A particular contribution he made to his industry was in promoting concern and solutions about the increasing use of unsafe foam in upholstering. This arose after the tragedy of November 18th 1968 at the Glasgow firm of A J & S Stern Ltd, when a fire generated highly toxic fumes from the furnishing material and 22 union members lost their lives. Ben Rubner and Ken Cameron of the Fire Brigades Union joined forces over the next few years to successfully arrive at a situation where upholstered furniture is now relatively safe in a fire situation.
In 1972, NUFTO merged with the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers and Construction Machinists (ASWCM) and formed the Furniture, Timber and Allied Trades Union (FTAT). In January 1974, Ben Rubner was elected Assistant General Secretary of the new union, which now began to make its mark as a major force in its sector and as a leading left union within the wider movement. By the time, in 1976, Ben Rubner rose to become the General Secretary of FTAT, a post he held until retirement in 1986, it had reached a membership of 80,000. (FTAT merged with the GMB during the 1990s) Rubner died aged 76 years on 21st September 1998.
Rubner has been described by Phil Davies, National Secretary of the CFTA section of the GMB, effectively the successor to FTAT within that union, as “a man of compassion, gentle, kind and a great negotiator”. Davies recalls Rubner’s tenacity and attention to detail in the interests of his members. At one set of difficult negotiations with the British Furniture Manufacturers Association, after 11 solid hours of tussling at 9pm, asked by colleagues if it were not time to settle, given the little that now separated the two sides, Rubner replied: “No. Another penny an hour means a loaf of bread to our members.” Needless to say, despite another three and a half hours of talks, the extra penny was obtained!
Morning Star 23rd September 1998 and 29th September 1998; Guardian 29th September 1998
George Rudé
Rudé was born in 1910 and died in 1993. He is primarily remembered as a professional historian and, in the post-war period, he was involved in forming the Communist Party Historians' Group. The historians involved in this project were a talented and eventually rather famous group. Amongst them were:
E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawn, Raphael Samuel, George Rudé, John Saville, Dorothy Thompson, Edmund Dell, Victor Kiernan and Maurice Dobb.
In 1952 members of the Communist Party Historians' Group founded the journal, `Past and Present’. Over the next few years the journal pioneered the study of working-class history. As a member of the Communist Party Rudé was blacklisted in the post-war academic world and was unable to obtain employment in the university system. He was for many years a teacher of modern languages in secondary schools in England. There is a suggestion that he may have been a branch secretary in the East Midlands district of the Party at some point in this career. Later he obtained university posts in Australia and Canada.
Books by Rudé include The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959), Wilkes and Liberty (1962), The Crowd in History (1964), Revolutionary Europe: 1783-1815 (1969). In 1969 Rudé co-wrote Captain Swing with Eric Hobsbawn.
Other books by Rudé include Paris and London in the 18th Century (1970), Hannoverian London: 1714-1808 (1971), Robespierre (1975), Ideology and Popular Protest (1980), Europe in the 18th Century (1985), The Face of the Crowd (1988) and The French Revolution (1989).
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ and other material
Bill Rust
Best known as the Editor of the Daily Worker and an International Brigade Commissar, William (Bill) Rust was born of working-class parents in Camberwell on April 24th, 1903. He left school at fourteen and was a clerk in a newspaper office, for the Hulton Press, in his youth. While in this employment he exposed a well-known trade union leader, J T Brownlie, (Amalgamated Society of Engineers), who was combining the function of President of this important union with that of a labour correspondent to the Hulton Press.
Rust joined the Communist Party “a couple of months after its formation in 1920", taking over the secretaryship of his local Camberwell Party branch. He was a member of Trades & Labour Council, the Workers Union and the General Committee of North Camberwell Labour Party. In 1922, he was the organiser of Camberwell’s NUWM (NUWCM) and LDC.
Later he became an organiser of the Young Workers League and edited its paper the “Young Worker”. The Young Workers League was the forerunner of the Young Communist League and Rust went to be secretary of the YCL and employed as a full time YCL organiser along with Dave Springhall (see entry for Springhall).
In July 1924 he attended the fourth world Congress of the Young Communist International in Moscow and, the following year, the fifth world congress of the Communist International when he was elected to its executive committee.
He became active in the unemployed struggles of the 1920s and was sent to prison for leading a demonstration against the eviction of an old woman. In 1925 he was the youngest of the twelve Communist Party leaders arrested by the Conservative Baldwin Government for seditious conspiracy under the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797. When the Communist leaders were found guilty, those with previous convictions got twelve months' imprisonment and those without six. Bill, because of the eviction struggle, was amongst those who served twelve months in Wandsworth jail and was released in April 1926 and he and seven others released were greeted by an enthusiastic rally in Hyde Park.
Rust became prominent within the Communist International and as such pursued its international political line within the newly established Communist Party from his position as YCL representative (along with Walter Tapsell) on the Party Central Committee. The YCL had become strongly associated with the process of transforming the vestiges of the federal character of the BSP that still pervaded sections of the Party and some saw the criticisms of youth as too sharp.
In consequence Rust was dropped from the recommended list for the new Central Committee to be elected at the 1927 Party Congress. Infuriated, Rust attended and sought election to the Central Committee from the floor, only narrowing losing (Robin Page Arnot had also been dropped from the list but was successfully re-elected). However, Rust was re-elected to the Central Committee in 1929.
In 1928 Rust took his wife and daughter Rosa to live in Moscow, in order that he could work for the Communist international, While in Moscow, he met, married and had a child with Tamara Kravets (Rust) later to marry Wogan Phillips. Their daughter Rosa disappeared in the Soviet Union in the 1930s as a child, only to reappear and return home in the 1940s. Rust has been also been severely criticised in retrospect by some authors over this affair.
Rust was the Editor of the Daily Worker in the formative early years - 1930-1932, 1939-1949. In this capacity, he presided over the foundation not only of the paper and its successor, the Morning Star, but was also largely responsible for the very house style and role that was to sustain the what is the only daily England language socialist journal published anywhere in the world.
A decision had been taken by the British Communist Party to establish a daily newspaper. (The Party was already the dominant force behind a successful Sunday paper, the `Sunday Worker’, which started in 1925.) But the decision to launch a daily paper was not universally popular within the Party, even Harry Pollitt hesitated at supporting the initiative, a position he later regretted. The Daily Worker’s head office was initially at 41 Tabernacle Street, London and the editor chosen was Rust, then only 26. It was a seminal moment in the development not only of British Communism but also British journalism.
Rust later admitted that “it must be said that my experience of daily journalism was practically nil”. Despite this, and the hand to mouth existence that ensued, Rust’s on-off editorship during the 1930s always seemed critical to each new phase of its miraculous development. Yet, there were real journalists with the paper, even if much of its collective expertise was acquired through on the job experience. The Daily Worker’s first reporters included Walter Holmes, who had been employed on the Daily Herald and then edited the Sunday Worker, Tom Wintringham (see entry), Frank Brennan Ward, a former Durham miner, Bill Shepherd, a woodworker who became sub-editor and Kay Beauchamp (see entry); three months later the team was joined by G Allen Hutt (see entry), who had also worked on Daily Herald.
Initially, Daily Worker sales were expected to be 25,000, but settled at 11,000 daily papers sold – readership of the Worker was always much higher than usual for newspapers in this period than numbers sold, due to interest in it amongst groups of workers. But the circulation figures were not helped by the sudden massive unemployment that surged amongst the working class and the boycott of the new paper by the commercial newspaper distribution networks. The refusal of the Provincial Wholesale Federation to handle or carry the Daily Worker was a severe blow. However, it forced the party set up its own distribution machinery, a system of that lasted for a further ten years
For the next decade, distribution relied upon individual Communists – often long-term unemployed – getting up before dawn and collecting bundles of papers at railway stations to cart on the handlebars of bicycles across villages and towns all over Britain. Party members tried selling multiple copies during the week but Saturday pitches were more common and this made for a need to ensure the Saturday paper was a special one and nudged at the market for the Sunday Worker, which was eventually closed so as to focus on the daily.
By 1932 the readership of the Daily Worker was up to 30,000 a day, with 46,000 on Saturdays; Rust had placed the paper on a direct course for success and stood down as Editor in 1933. The fruits of his labour were enjoyed by his successor; by 1939, daily readership had climbed to between 40-50,000, with an astonishing 75,000 to 80,000 copies sold on Saturdays. By the mid point of the Second World War, the paper could not print enough copies to sell, due to paper rationing. It was selling 125,000 a day. Four or five times that number were reading it and, if there had been no paper restrictions, the Daily Worker would have certainly sold well in excess of a quarter of a million newspapers a day. It was even beginning to attract commercial advertising.
During the Spanish Civil War, although severely injured in a motor accident some time previously, Rust officially acted as correspondent of the Daily Worker. However his primary role in Spain was as political commissar from November 1937 to June 1938. He took his role very seriously and visited the front line daily for his reports. He subsequently wrote his `Britons in Spain’, the first history of the British Battalion of the International Brigade.
Rust was the Editor of the Daily Worker in the formative early years - 1930-1932, 1939-1949. Against the remarkable legacy of what would become today’s Morning Star, some historians and biographers have treated Rust somewhat unfavourably for his stance over the Party’s attitude to the outbreak of war in September 1939. Rust was a member of the three-man secretariat (Dutt and Springhall were the others) to whom Harry Pollitt had voluntarily relinquished his responsibilities as General Secretary. The secretariat found itself at odds with the rest of the Political Bureau (Pollitt, Gallacher, JR Campbell, Emile Burns and Ted Bramley), which was largely supportive of Pollitt.
Thus, in 1939, Rust returned to editing the Daily Worker after Campbell’s resignation during the upheaval in the composition of the Party’s leadership, arising from political attitudes to the war. Almost immediately Rust was thrown into battle with the war-time Coalition Government. Herbert Morrison, now Home Secretary, who as leader of the London Labour Party during the popular front period had battled vainly to prevent Labour and Communist unity, in January 1941 positively relished the opportunity to use the threat of national security to ban the Daily Worker from printing, under Defence Regulation D2. The Party responded by publishing various local and national publications (such as Peoples Press), so as to get around the ban and mobilised a massive campaign involving the wider Left to get the ban finally lifted in August 1942.
In the General Election of 1945, Bill Rust got an element of revenge for the war time ban on the Daily Worker by standing in Herbert Morrison's own constituency of Hackney South. But even sweeter was the vision that he was by now fully preoccupied with, that of turning the now thriving Daily Worker into a unique phenomena. One that harked back to the success that had been the Sunday Worker; the aim was novel, yet it became a historic reality that has endured even beyond a name change and many other challenges, right through to today’s `Morning Star’. Bill Rust’s role has been immortalised by the paper today by the naming of its premises after him; such an act is often puzzling to modern readers of the paper, especially when they read academic analyses of British Communism that translate Rust’s personal, undoubted, single-mindedness into some variant of unpleasantry bordering on mental instability. These imaginings miss the genius that was in Bill Rust, which can still be marvelled at six days a week.
Rust’s vision for the paper explains the high regard with which he is viewed in retrospect; his aim was no less than to shift ownership of the paper from that of being the leading organ of the Communist Party to a readers’ co-operative, the better to enable it to succeed as a mass voice for the whole labour movement, albeit always recognising the editorial voice of the Party. The year 1948 saw these post-war plans coming to fruition. In February, a special issue reprinted the 1848 Communist Manifesto to celebrate its centenary, and this sold 230,000 copies. The May Day special sold 251,000. Turning the paper into a mass circulation one seemed an unstoppable prospect.
31st October 1948 was acclaimed by the Party's General Secretary, Harry Pollitt, as the 'greatest and proudest day' in the paper's history; for a revamped Daily Worker came off the new Goss press in the new building in Farringdon Road. A torchlight procession of 20,000 demonstrators stopped all traffic as crowds surged round Bill Rust and carried him shoulder-high to Clerkenwell Green, where he auctioned the first two copies for the staggering sum of £45 each (perhaps £1,500 to £2,000 today!). Next day, he received a telegram from George Loveless, a descendant of the 1834 Tolpuddle Martyrs: 'Today is a proud day for us all. This is what our ancestors fought for. Long live the people's paper.'
This all harked back to the success that had been the Sunday Worker; the aim was novel, yet it became a historic reality that has endured even beyond a name change and many other challenges, right through to today’s `Morning Star’.
Bill Rust
But sweetness can turn sour; three months after this triumph, on Thursday February 3rd 1949, Bill Rust suddenly collapsed and died. It is likely that the Herculean personal effort that he had forced himself to make, in the course of realising his own vision for the paper contributed to his heart attack. The shock that the paper’s staff and the whole Party felt at this sad turn of events is impossible in retrospect to convey. His successor, Johnny Campbell, rightly and simply called him 'the greatest editor in British working class history'.
Whilst the course of the next period would be rocky in the extreme, for the Cold War would marginalize Communists in a way that seemed unlikely in 1948, the foundations that had been laid by Rust for his beloved newspaper were solid; even today, the heir to the traditions, the Morning Star, is the only English language daily socialist newspaper in the entire world! What an epitaph.
Michael Walker; Sources: `William Rust - a fighter for the people’, Peoples Press pamphlet (1949); Noreen Branson, `History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: 1927-1941 (1985)
A list of some of Bill Rust’s pamphlets follows:
`The case for the YCL’ [1927?].
`Down with the "national" government! : an exposure of the capitalist conspiracy against the workers and how to fight it’ [1929?].
`It's your paper : the story of the eleventh year of the Daily Worker’
(with J R Campbell) `Socialism and peace : a reply to the ILP’ [1936]
`Communism and cotton’ [1936?].
`Labour and armaments’ [1937]
`Finland press lies : why they lied, how they lied and how the Daily Worker told the truth’ [1940?]
`The inside story of the Daily Worker : 10 years of working class journalism’ [1940?]
`Victory this year’ [1942]
`Daily Worker reborn’ [1943].
`13 years of anti-fascist struggle’ [1943].
`Voice of the people’ [1944 - Daily Worker League]
`Victory year: 1945’ [1945].
`Gagged by Grigg: a plea for the lifting of the ban on the appointment of a Daily Worker correspondent on the grounds that this political discrimination is harmful to the cause for which the nation is fighting’
[1944?]
`32 questions on the freedom of the press’ [n.d. PPPS]
Shapurji Saklatvala
Although the celebrated Communist MP from the 1920s, Shapurji Saklatvala (`Sak’ to many) was not a foundation member of the Communist Party, he joined it within months of its establishment, after the ILP's Annual Conference had rejected a move to affiliate to the Communist International. He remained a loyal and active member of the Communist Party until his death in 1936.
He was the third Indian Member of Parliament (MP) in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, after fellow Parsis Dadabhai Naoroji and Mancherjee Bhownagree.
Saklatvala was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, on March 28, 1874 the son of a merchant. A Parsi by background, he worked for his wealthy uncle's firm, Tata Industries, but suffered from poor health and in October 1905 he was sent to England for medical treatment. Saklatvala became involved in left-wing politics and in 1907 he joined the SDF. Two years later he left to join the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and remained an active member and valued speaker across the country fro the next decade.
Saklatvala was adopted as the parliamentary candidate for Battersea North by the Battersea Labour Party and Trades Council, in June 1921. He had just resigned from the Independent Labour Party, and had joined the Communist Party. At that time it was possible to be both a member of the Communist Party and the Labour Party at the same time. There were no bans on joint membership until 1925. Shapurji Saklatvala was elected the Labour MP for Battersea North at the General Election in 1922. He lost his seat a year later, but was re-elected, this time as a Communist, at the December 1923 election. He represented the South London constituency for five years until defeated by a Labour candidate in 1929.
`Sak' in 1922
Throughout all three of Saklatvala's election campaigns, when he was the candidate of the Battersea Trades Council, the press was vitriolic in its attack on his revolutionary politics. During the 1923 campaign, Hogbin, Saklatvala's opponent, fed information to the press –which enthusiastically followed his line - that there were `foreign gangs' operating in the constituency, with the supposed aim of breaking up Hogbin's meetings. Hogbin referred to a gang of `Irish rebels', including `twenty gunmen' and another of “continental and Russian communists".
But it is profoundly significant that for five years, from Saklatvala's initial adoption until 1926, there was no challenge to his candidacy from within the local Labour movement. When a challenge did come, it was in response to national influences, and not local politics, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Saklatvala's racial origin.
Although initially the local `coloured’ activist John Archer and Saklatvala worked together in the Battersea Labour Party and Trades Council, when the split came over the admissibility of communists, they were on different sides. Archer supported the Communists’ expulsion, and when an official Trades and Labour Council was established in July 1926, became the first secretary of the North Battersea Divisional Labour Party. He campaigned against the old Trades Council and championed Saklatvala's Labour rival at the 1929 General Election. “Although Saklatvala and Archer were non whites operating in an overwhelmingly white Labour movement, their careers in the 1920s illustrate that politics and not race was the determining factor when it came to allegiances.”
Saklatvala faced many other pressures. His secretary, Reg Bishop, in an obituary in the Daily Worker wrote: "For the first year or two after his election as the MP for Battersea North, there were many who tried to get him to break from the Communist Party. The Under Secretaryship of State for India was the smallest of inducements held out if he would only be more orthodox in his politics".
During 1926 Saklatvala was a strong supporter of the miners. After one speech made in Hyde Park he urged the army not to fire on the strikers. Saklatvala was arrested and found guilty of sedition was sentenced to two months in Wormwood Scrubs Prison.
For its continued support for Saklatvala, the Battersea Labour Party and Trades Council was disaffiliated in 1926, and a few months later a new Labour Party and Trades Council was established. There was rivalry between the two organisations for a period, but by the time of the 1929 General Election the old Trades Council existed in name only. In 1927 Stephen Sanders, a long time activist in the Battersea Labour movement, was adopted as the official Labour candidate, and this effectively signalled the end of Saklatvala's success. He lost the seat in 1929, and his vote declined even further at the election of 1931. By the time of the next General Election in 1935, in line with the Communist Party's new strategy he urged his supporters in the constituency to vote Labour.
Saklatvala's socialism came about as a direct result of his opposition to colonialism. He settled in Britain from India in 1905 at the age of 30 having left India, in part, because of his brushes with the British authorities. In 1909, at Manchester, where he was working as a departmental manager for Tata's, he joined the Independent Labour Party. From then onwards Saklatvala was to spend much of his time in pursuit of his two main concerns -- socialism and anti colonialism.
Although his socialist ideas, under the impact of the Russian Revolution, underwent a radical transformation, his approach to colonial freedom remained consistent. That is he constantly sought to build a united front between the workers of Britain and the forces for liberation in the colonies. This approach can be seen in one of the first Labour movement organisations to concern itself with anti-imperialism, the Workers Welfare League of India. The league was established by Saklatvala in 1917. Saklatvala was the first secretary of the League's Indian Committee.
A number of national Trade Unions were affiliated to it, as were numerous trade union branches. At a time when support for colonialism was strong, even amongst organised sections of the working class, the Workers Welfare League of India, strongly influenced by Saklatvala's united front approach, made some headway in breaking down barriers between the British and Indian Labour movements.
The League Against Imperialism, which was not solely concerned with British colonialism, was another body that Saklatvala was to play a prominent role in. Formed in 1927, the League drew together many of the national liberation movements. At its founding Congress in Brussels in February 1927, there were 175 delegates from 37 countries. Saklatvala’s commitment to the League led to his arrest and brief
In a message to the founding congress of the Communist Party of India in 1925, Saklatvala had made clear his own, and the British Party's commitment to the building of a broad anti-colonial alliance, as the way to win self determination. In pursuit of this, he then made a widely publicised visit to India, in 1927, which lasted three months and was so successful that, on his return, the British Government denied him any future access to the country of his birth. During the visit he was given the freedom of a number of Indian cities, and granted an official welcome by the Madras and Calcutta City authorities. He met and entered into a dialogue with Gandhi, later published as a pamphlet by the British Party, entitled, `Is India Different?'
Saklatvala also made contact with Communist groups that had recently been established. He also met Phil Spratt and George Allison, both members of the British Communist Party, sent work under cover to help organise the Indian trade union movement. Soon after Saklatvala's visit Allison was deported back to England. In 1928 he was replaced by Ben Bradley, two years after the visit Bradley, Spratt and thirty one other active trade unionists were arrested.
They were tried at Meerut in front of an English civil servant, and after four years deliberation, the prisoners were given sentences of between three years, and transportation for life. The Meerut Conspiracy Trial received wide publicity, and because of the indignation it aroused, the sentences were later reduced, and some of the prisoners released. When Ben Bradley, whose ten year sentence was commuted, returned to England in 1933, he was met at Victoria Station by Saklatvala on behalf of the Communist Party. Continuing to play a high profile role for the Party, Shapurji Saklatvala died in 1936.
See also:
Sehri Saklatvala `The Fifth Commandment the biography of Shapurji Saklatvala by his daughter’
http://www.maze-in.com/saklatvala/pages/conts.htm
Mark Wadsworth `Comrade Sak’
Shapurji Saklatvala and the Fight against Racism and Imperialism 1921-28
Alf Salisbury
Born to Latvian Jewish immigrant parents in 1909, one of ten children. Left school at 14 and joined the merchant marine and the NUS. Jumped ship in 1926 in New York. A three-year trek across the USA saw him become involved with the IWW, the `Wobblies’. Back at sea in 1929, he was arrested in Guatemala as a spy and spent seven weeks in prison.
Returning to Britain, he joined the CPGB in 1929. Blacklisted from merchant navy in 1936 and became an activist in the National Unemployed Workers Movement and participated in anti-fascist struggles, including Cable Street. Joined the International Brigade in 1937 and returned to Britain in 1938 after the Brigades were withdrawn and became secretary of the Stepney NUWM.
Alf Salisbury (left) demonstrating in Stepney in 1936
Rejected for military service on medical grounds in the war, he married Lilly Nicklansky and they moved to Maryport, Cumbria, where Alf worked in a munitions plant and became a shop steward. Involved in a rent strike in post war London, being evicted because of it. An inveterate picketer, leafleter, demonstrator and marcher even into old age, he famously threw himself in front of lorries on the picket line at the Savoy Hotel in 1949.
Employed in the textile, clothing, chemical, furniture and railway industries in the post war period until formal retirement. For four decades, he was a delegate to Westminster and City Trades Council. Co-founded Waltham Forest CND. He died on November 5th 2000, aged 91.
Morning Star November 11th 2000; Guardian December 8th 2000
Raphael Samuel
Raphael Samuel, the son of Jewish Communist parents, was born in London in 1934 and educated at King's Alfred's School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was taught by Christopher Hill.
Samuel became a member of the Communist Party and joined the Communist Party Historians' Group. He became a tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford, and in 1967 established the History Workshop movement. Whilst he left the Party, he remained very sympathetic to the personal factors that influenced individual choices about membership and resisted crude anti-communistic propaganda.
He also played a major role in the life of the History Workshop Journal that began publication in 1975. Raphael Samuel died of cancer on 9th December 1996.
Books published by Samuel include:
Village Life and Labour (1975)
Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers (1977)
People's History and Socialist Theory (1981)
East End Underworld (1981)
Culture, Ideology and Politics (1983)
Theatres of the Left: 1880-1935 (1985)
The Lost World of Communism (1986)
The Enemy Within: The Miners' Strike of 1984 (1987)
Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (1989)
Patriotsm: Minorities and Outsiders (1989)
The Myths We Live By (1990)
Theatres of Memory (1996)
Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (1997)
Laurie Sapper
Lawrence Joseph Sapper was born on 15th September 1922 and brought up in west London. He displayed an astonishing photographic memory from the age of five and went to grammar school.
During the Second World War, he joined the Communist Party and was a Senior Instructor in the RAF in technical matters during the. After demobilisation, he qualified as a barrister whilst studying part time while working for the Ministry of Agriculture but did not practice, deciding to use his legal training and outside of courts. He became known as a brilliant writer and broadcaster, participating in over 300 broadcasts, talking about aspects of the law.
In the post-war period, he held several posts in civil service unions, starting as Assistant General Secretary in the Institute of Professional and Civil Servants (IPCS), then Deputy General Secretary of the Post Office Engineering Union (POEU) and finally retiring as the General Secretary of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) from 1969-1983, which he steered into TUC affiliation. His earlier legal training enabled him to function well as the only trade union Chair of a Social Security Appeals Tribunal. His brother was Alan Sapper, General Secretary of film union, ACTT. Laurie Sapper was an opponent of the revisionist leadership of the 1980s and a member of the re-established Communist Party of Britain from the outset; he died aged 66 on 26th August 1989.
Morning Star 30th August 1989; Independent 30th August 1989
William (Bill) Savage
Savage was the Editor of the Communist Party’s Essex-based publication, the `Rural Crusader’. In June 1946, its first edition was launched and it soon achieved a circulation of 2,500 copies.
The Rural Crusader had a rather unique (for the left) mix of village gossip, horticultural news, a Miss Essex competition, sports, politics, trade union advice, attacks on local US bases, but also included developments in the “socialist world”.
Its objective, according to the editorial in the first edition, was: “A paper that intends to voice the needs and desires of the ordinary village folk….The Crusader is intended to help drive to improve the conditions in the villages; it will turn a searchlight on every injustice that comes to it’s notice.”
Given the limited resources (each copy cost 3d) at William Savage’s disposal, this was a very professionally produced and readable publication.
The origins of the Rural Crusader, according to Savage, was his defeat as a communist candidate in a local council seat in Wethersfield, Essex in 1946 (losing to a Mr Barron, a local farmer, by 119 votes) “I had run for the Rural District Council and not having succeeded at the first attempt decided to do what I could to get some of the shocking things that I had found during canvassing put right. So, out came the Crusader.”
The Crusader, while under the sphere of influence of the CP, supported not only Communist councillors such as Harold Quinton, on Braintree Urban District Council, but also local left wing Labour councillors such as Stanley Wilson a pro Soviet Labour councillor since 1929 in Saffon Walden, and George Lowe “a crippled cobbler” councillor in Dunmow 1930-1950) and the infamous Rev Jack Putterill of Thaxted, who also wrote regularly for the Rural Crusader including in August 1946 the following statement “The Tories failed to oppose Hitler, and took a chance he would spend himself fighting and destroying the Soviet Union”.
While Cllr Stanley Wilson stated on the 29th anniversary of the Soviet revolution in the Rural Crusader that “Soviet communism has come to stay, and will certainly spread until one day becomes world wide” and that he “saluted the Red Army who at the greatest crisis in world history defeated fascism”.
The Crusader also backed local Labour member of Parliament, Tom Drieberg, MP for Maldon. The Rural Crusade carried information on agricultural workers’ evictions, sackings such as that of Councillor A. V. Royce and NUAW branch secretary at Maldon, evicted from his tied cottage because of his politics.
It reported, in 1948, on the dismissal in 1949 of Mr McLeod Davies, a tutor at Mid Essex Technical College because he had lived in Russia, News on the sacking of 500 agricultural workers in East Anglia in 1947 due to poor harvests and the 1947 squatters’ movement at Marks Hall RAF base, Rectory Army Camp at Sible Hedingham and Great Saling.
Savage and the Rural Crusader were banned from covering Braintree Rurual District Council business in February 1950, in an attempt to gag him.
Spin off local editions of the journal occurred at Harlow, Bishop’s Stortford and Dunmow under the title `Clarion’ and an Association of Crusaders paying 1s per annum was also established.
Around 1950 the Rural Crusader adopted the title `County Standard’ and disappeared into that title soon after, Savage writing occasionally on rural issues for the Country Standard from then on.
Savage lived for a number of years at Cut Hedge, Shalford, Braintree, Essex, moving in 1949 to Little Bentley, Colchester.
William Savage stated that his paternal grandparents were Josiah & Elizabeth Savage of Hundon, Suffolk and he was descended on his mother’s side from James Lamb (his grandfather), a committed old radical from Huntingdon who hated the landed gentry.
Michael Walker
Jim Savage
Born in Cork in 1923, the story of his life was to be inexorably linked to the struggles for Irish freedom and socialism. In the tradition of the great Irish labour leader and revolutionary James Connolly, Jim Savage was one of those who saw no antagonism between the struggles for national independence and socialism, maintaining, like Connolly, that the two were indeed complementary.
Whether as a member of the old IRA or, for much of his life, the Communist Party of Ireland, Jim worked with like-minded comrades "to maintain this link," while fighting political reaction in whichever guise it reared its ugly head. In 1935, at the age of 12, he joined the republican youth movement, the Fianna. By the age of 17, he was commanding officer of the number two company of the IRA first battalion in Cork.
It was during this period that he came into close contact with fellow Cork man, left-wing republican and prominent International Brigader Michael O'Riordan, who was also in the IRA at that time. O'Riordan, who had fought with the Connolly Column on the side of the democratically elected republican government of Spain in the war against the fascist insurgency of General Franco, went on to become the chairman of the Communist Party of Ireland. Both Savage and O'Riordan were among large numbers of republicans interned in the Curragh during the early to mid-1940s by the De Valera government of the day, which adopted a position of neutrality in the war against nazi Germany.
It was a time of increasingly sharp divisions within the republican movement over its role and political direction and both O'Riordan and Savage became prominent figures of the left-wing Connolly Group. Following their release on extended parole in the mid-1940s, both threw themselves into socialist politics, first founding the Liam Mellows branch of the Irish Labour Party in Cork and then, after their expulsion for being too radical for the timorous right-wing Labour leadership of the day, the Cork Socialist Party.
Despite its name, the latter was effectively the Cork branch of the Communist Party of Ireland. The reason behind the subterfuge was the exceptionally strong grip of the Catholic church in Cork, which waged virulent anti-communist campaign against what it saw as the nefarious evils associated with all forms of "godless" socialism.
As Jim told me many years later, it was far from unusual, especially during the anti-communist fervour of the 1950s, for the Catholic church in Cork to mount daily processions outside the Savage household protesting at the "red threat" within.
It was sometime after his release from the Curragh that Jim came into contact with the late Desmond Greaves, Irish labour historian, political activist and editor of the Connolly Association's newspaper the Irish Democrat for over 40 years. (See entry for Greaves.) It was Greaves who persuaded him to write for the paper, a commitment that he maintained for five decades, until ill health prevented him from contributing further at the beginning of 2002.
Many of his contributions focused on issues of concern to the local working-class movement - as both a trade union and political activist, he was often directly involved - and highlighted the malign effects of Irish capitalism on ordinary working people, especially the poor and the vulnerable. Something of a pioneer in raising the environmentalist banner, he also alerted readers to the dangers posed by pollution and the poor health and safety practices prevalent among industrial employers, especially the major petrol and chemical concerns operating in and around Cork.
Yet, as a committed internationalist, he never forgot the bigger picture, especially his commitment to a united and independent Ireland. He was staunch supporter of the civil rights approach to achieving Irish unity. This was originally conceived by Greaves and taken up by trade unionists and other progressives in the six counties, who went on to form the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.
While a supporter of the current Irish peace process, this support was undoubtedly tempered by concerns over what he saw as Britain's duplicitous role and a general mistrust of politicians, including republicans and socialists, whom he saw as equally susceptible to the intoxication of power and the trappings of office as others from less progressive backgrounds.
A modest man of enormous personal and political integrity and courage, Jim will be remembered on both sides of the Irish Sea by those who knew him as a socialist and a champion of Irish freedom. Shortly before the Easter rising against the yoke of British imperialism in 1916, James Connolly declared: "The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered."
It's a sentiment by which Jim Savage lived his life and one which progressives in Britain would do well to adopt as part of their contribution to the struggle to overcome the legacy of British imperialism in Ireland. Jim Savage died in hospital on Cork on December 16th 2005 following a short illness.
David Glanville
Morning Star Wednesday 28th December 2005
Reggie Saxton
The son of a botany lecturer, Saxton was born in Cape Town on July 13th 1911 and then spent his childhood in India. His family returned to England in 1920 and he was educated at Repton School in Derbyshire. He went on to read medicine at Sydney College, Cambridge.
Saxton joined the Communist Party in 1935, after buying a Daily Worker at Paddington Station, where he travelled daily as a commuter to work from Reading. Having trained at St Barts, he qualified as a doctor in 1935. He visited the Soviet Union and returned to become a GP in Reading.
In August 1936, he was one of a group of qualified and student medical workers who met to consider ways of providing medical aid to Spain. This led to the Spanish Medical Aid Committee. On 23rd August, the first unit left for Spain. The English hospital was set up in a farmhouse in Hesca, 18 kilometres behind the Aragon front. Saxton arrived there himself on 29th September.
This hospital group later played a major role in the battle for Madrid. An improvised hospital was set up at a hotel up to February 1937. Ferocious fighting broke out around the fascist attempts to encircle the capital. With Dr Alexander Tudor-Hart and others, Saxton set up a field hospital in a country club, using the bar as a theatre and the furniture as operating tables. In the first five days, 700 wounded were treated.
Reg Saxton in Spain
Norman Bethune, the Canadian Communist who had pioneered blood transfusion in China for the Red Army arrived and he passed on many lessons. Saxton worked out new methods for blood transfusions and classified the bloods of donors. He played a significant role in the pioneering by the Republican forces in the use of forward field hospitals, backed up by mobile surgical hospitals.
In May 1937, he organised transfusion services in a hospital set up in a mountain ski station. Then back to a hospital just outside Madrid. Saxton’s transfusion services proved crucial during the July 1937 diversionary offensive at Brunete. 50,000 Republican troops smashed through the fascist lines and kept the resulting salient at the cost of 20,000 of them.
At yet another base, El Escorial, Saxton vainly treated Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf. In the autumn of 1937, Saxton was back at a hospital in the area he first been. By January 1938 he was at Teruel. He designed a mobile testing laboratory, fitted on the chassis of a bomb-damaged Ford ambulance.
During the three month offensive across the River Ebro during the summer of 1938, which aimed to link the two halves of fascist Spain, Saxton took his mobile transfusion unit to a hospital cave. His work on transfusions was published in the Lancet and would inform the setting up of blood banks in wartime Britain.
In Spain, Saxton formed a relationship with a working class medical administrator, Rosaleen Ross (Smythe). On their return, Saxton appears to have failed to sufficiently combat snobbish family hostility towards her and she settled in Vancouver with another International Brigader.
Saxton was Assistant Medical Officer for Health, covering civil defence matters, for Brighton from 1939 to 1941. He rose to become a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Burma and was mentioned in despatches for bravery.
He practiced as a GP in the Brighton area after the war and married an actress. They moved to South Wales to work in medical practice with Tudor-Hart. In post war years, Saxton was active in CND and returned to Brighton on retirement.
Rosaleen and Reggie Saxton were re-united at the 1996 IB reunion. Two years later they went to live together in Canada. In 2001, Saxton took part in a reunion at the cave hospital in Spain. He and Rosaleen returned to Britain in 2002. Ever the campaigner, Saxton was fiercely against the Iraq war. He died on March 27th 2004 in Worthing, aged 92 years.
Guardian 8th April 2004; Morning Star 19th April 2004
Arthur Scargill
Best known, of course, for his leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill joined the Young Communist League in 1956. He was Chair of the Yorkshire District of the YCL and a delegate to the World Youth Festival of 1957. As a Communist local government election candidate in 1960, he got 138 votes, or 14.5% of the vote. Scargill joined his NUM branch committee that same year and subsequently failed to renew his YCL membership card in 1963.
Harold Scargill
Harold Scargill started work in the coal mines at the age of 13, taking part in every single battle that the miners engaged in and continued working in the industry until he was 65 years old. Harold was a life-long Communist from the youngest age. His father was an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution, which occurred as Harold was about eleven years old. When he was only 14, his father took him to meetings addressed by Communist leaders such as Willie Gallagher, Isobel Brown and at the age of 18, he shared a platform with Harry Pollitt. (See separate entries for all three.)
During the run up and the course of the Strike and subsequent miners’ lock-out, Harold was especially fired and inspired by the barnstorming style of leadership of A J Cook, as he is invariably known to history, or Arthur as friends and family called him. Harold’s son, Arthur, also to become a President of the NUM was later often compared with, or accused of aping, Cook’s leadership example.
Harold worked at Wombwell pit for a very long time, though it entailed a daily five mile walk to work each way. Conscripted during the Second World War, he served in the RAF in West Africa. He was an active supporter of the working men’s club movement, the Club and Institute Union and was interested in the life of the community of Worsborough Dale, his home village, where he helped build a Youth Centre.
A highly literate and witty man, Harold – and for that matter his teenage son - was dealt a terrible blow by the untimely death of his wife, Alice Scargill (née Pickering) in 1956. Throughout the 1950s, Harold was publicly active in peace campaigns. In the NUM, he was firmly opposed to the Coal Board’s incentive bonus scheme. Despite the fact that miners, in a pit head ballot, democratically rejected the scheme, the then NUM leadership imposed it on the men. Undoubtedly, Harold’s principled and stubborn hostility to this (he called the leadership “class collaborators and hypocrites” must have had a profound effect on his young son. Harold died on 12th January 1989, aged 82.
Funeral Oration by Frank Watters - 19th January 1989; GS personal knowledge
Minna Cairns (nee Cromack) Scarth
A highly literate woman, Minna was born Wilhelmina Cairns Cormack (Minna is the short form of this German female form of William, which was then fashionable). Her birthday is probably May 26th and she was born in the 1880s. Her younger sister was Hattie, who revered Minna as her “teacher”; evidently Minna was either actually a teacher, or had a natural talent for communicating to young people.
Alice Cromack was a relative (possibly a much younger sister) who married one Samuel Sykes Webster. Their daughter Enid Hartley (senior) was Freda Hartley's mother. (See separate entry for Freda Watters.) Minna was thus the sister of Freda's aunt by marriage and appears to have been something of a mentor to her in the development of her politics.
Minna married one H Scarth, possibly Harold. They lived at Ern Scar, Rodley, West Yorkshire. Family lore has it that Freda often visited her in this picturesque setting. For Rodley is a village on the north west outskirts of the city of Leeds in England. The Leeds and Liverpool Canal passes through it, running parallel with Rodley Town Street. Many of the stone built industrial buildings and mills that once lined the banks of the canal have been demolished and replaced with modern flats. Some mills and industrial buildings survive, though many are in a desperate state of disrepair having lost their roofs and windows. Today, the village is also home to Rodley Nature Reserve, a wetland reserve built on the former site of a sewage works.
From her youth in late Victorian and Edwardian Britian, Minna became a highly read individual, mostly in the sphere of English literature. A politically significant product of this teaching bent was that the young Freda Hartley, denied grammar school education for financial reasons, was directed by her mother to become mentored by Minna.
She was to give Freda, as a present, one of William Gallagher’s (the Communist MP) books of autobiography, “The Chosen Few”, that she and her husband had acquired in 1940, when she (and possibly her husband, also) was either sympathetic to, or even a member of the Communist Party. Clearly, Freda looked up to Minna and rated her highly, as evidenced by the fact that name of her `aunt’ was still treated with some reverence by the Hartley family years after her death. No more is currently known about her but the reasonable belief exists that it was Minna who guided the young Freda Hartley, and possibly some of her siblings and even her mother, to Communism.
Joanne Stevenson
Cash Scorer
Catherine (Cash) Scorer was born in 1947. A trained solicitor, she became a research officer, then legal officer, for the Technical and Supervisory Staffs (TASS) union, formerly the Draughtsmen’s and Allied Technicians Association (DATA) in 1979.
A former member of the executive of the progressive legal entity, the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, Cash was active in the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) for 16 years and a member of its executive from 1976. The Chair of NCCL in 1983/4, she presided over its Northern Ireland committee from 1979; she had been the first Northern Ireland officer for NCCL from 1973, having been involved in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). A member of the Communist Party Executive Committee and long-standing member of the Party, she was to tragically die aged only 38 in 1986 of cancer.
Morning Star 4th April 1986
Bill Sedley
Born in 1910 in London of a Jewish immigrant family, Bill Sedley became a graduate in economics and law. He operated a legal advice service in the East End of London in the 1930s. Sedley was especially known for his defence of tenants’ rights in 1938-9 and for providing support for squatters’ rights and mortgage strikes after the war.
He founded the firm of lawyers of Seifert and Sedley in the 1940s with Sigmund Seifert and was a life-long Communist and supporter of the Morning Star even until his last days; he died in 1985.
Morning Star July 7th 1985
Connie Seifert
Constance Seifert was born on January 20th 1911 in the east end of London to a Polish Jewish family, which had emigrated to evade pogroms. Whilst enormously fond of Jewish culture, she was repulsed by the downgrading of the role of women by Orthodox Judaism and the bigotry of Zionism. On a visit to Palestine in the early 1930s, she was disgusted with the anti-Arab racism she encountered.
In 1935, she and her future husband, Sigmund Seifert, joined the Communist Party, she remaining a member until the dissolution of the CPGB. During the Second World War, she was active on the evacuation of children from London. In the post-war period, she was active in the National Assembly of Women, the British Peace Committee and the British-Soviet Friendship Society. Later, she was active in campaigns for nursery education.
From the early 1950s, Connie and Sigmund Seifert placed their comfortable north London home in Highgate at the disposal of the Communist Party, of which they were both members. It became a social centre for the next half a century for the great and good of the left. Paul Robson sang there, to raise funds for Cheddi Jagan’s Progressive Peoples Party of Guiana. Nigeria’s Prince Oyekan II Oba `dropped in’ for a couple of nights, complete with entourage, and stayed for three months whilst engaged in a case before the Privy Council.
Connie’s house provided a safe haven for refugees from all over the Middle East and Africa. In the 1970s, Chilean Communist leader, Luis Corvalan stayed there, with armed bodyguards, for several days. She was active in the British Vietnam Association long after the end of the terrible war in Vietnam and died on February 27th 1998, aged 87.
Guardian March ? 1998
Bob Selkirk
A Communist councillor for Cowdenbeath’s Ward 4 for 32 years, like many of the giants of Scottish Communism, Selkirk came from a family with a mighty tradition of dissent. His grandfather had been imprisoned in the 1850s under the Master and Servant Act for daring to leave his job without permission; he had become the first secretary of the Arniston miners’ union in Mid-Lothian.
Bob himself was born on the 29th May 1887 in the family town of Arniston. He first went down a pit to work at the age 12 in Slamanan, Stirlingshire. By the age of 17, he had joined the Edinburgh branch of the Socialist Labour Party; he was also involved in a branch of the International Workers of the World (IWW), the American body that had established sympathising groups amongst some Scottish miners.
By the early 1930s, Communists had established a formidable base in the pits that surrounded Cowdenbeath. The Party became to dominate the “4th ward”, winning first one and then two and all of the seats in the council elections for over a thirty year period.
Bob was first elected from 1935, one of two Communists elected on that occasion, and was then re-elected every three years thereafter. He only once lost when, beset by illness, he was unable to properly campaign; but he bounced back again the following year. He was made the first Communist Bailie in Scotland and, in 1968, a Honorary Burgess of the Burgh of Cowdenbeath. Again, this freedom of the borough was a first for a Communist but others were to subsequently receive such honours.
Selkirk was always affectionately known in his times to all in his town as `Auld Bob’ (Old Bob); his son, also a Communist, who himself only narrowly failed to win election as a councillor was always `young Bob’ no matter how old he was!
Jim Service
Aged ten, he accompanied his mother on door to door and street collections for the International Brigade. He became a member of the Socialist Sunday School and the Woodcraft Folk, joining the YCL in 1942, when he was fifteen. He later joined the Communist Party in which he was a member for the rest of his life.
In his youth he worked as a painter, becoming a member of the Scottish Painters Union, which later became part of UCATT. He subsequently went on to work in Scottish television and chaired a joint union shop stewards committee before becoming a full time official for the National Association of Theatre and Kinematic Employees (NATKE), now part of BECTU. In 1978, he became an organiser and then Scottish secretary of Equity, remaining in that post until he retired from full time work.
As a baritone singer he was involved with and became conductor of the YCL choir which won many prizes and sang at festivals all over Europe. He was a member of the Scottish Youth Theatre Board. Died aged 77 on 24th December 2004.
Morning Star January 4th 2005
Jean Shapiro
Jean Shapiro was born on November 25 1916, in Carshalton, Surrey. At Commonweal Lodge school, Purley, where she became head girl, she was also the only pupil in her class to go into higher education. She took a diploma in journalism at University College London. In the mid-1930s, inspired by the Spanish civil war, she joined the Communist Party and remained an active member for two decades.
Her first job was to sub-edit the memoirs of past Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. She worked on `Farmer and Stockbreeder’, writing on women's issues. Her first marriage to fellow journalist Stewart Farrar ended during the Second World War, a period when she had a formative experience. Her first baby was taken from her before she had seen her, since she had spina bifida and was unlikely to live more than a few days. Later in the war, she married a Communist, Jewish airman - the clinical psychologist Monte Shapiro. (See next entry.)
She took on the refurbishing of an old building as a day nursery for working mothers. While her children were young, she worked as a teacher. Shapiro’s writing for the Daily Worker focused particularly on women's issues. She left the Party in 1956, soon after Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin.
Jean Shapiro was home editor for `Good Housekeeping’ and, for 17 years, answered readers' letters. The problems that readers presented inspired her later books - on motherhood and childcare - and her campaigning.
In her late years she became an influential voice for feminism, using her earlier experience; her most important work being `Ourselves, Growing Older’ (1989). She also wrote `On Your Own’ (1985) a guide for separated, divorced and widowed women - which offered advice on coping with everything from a leaky roof to a new relationship - and `Get The Best Out Of The Rest Of Your Life’ (1990). Shapiro became involved with the University of the Third Age in Bristol, where she ran a non-fiction writing group. Jean Shapiro died on May 10th 2005, aged 88,
Guardian May 19th 2005
Jock Shanley
Born in 1903 in Aberdeen, he was educated at Ruskin College and the Central Labour College. Before the Second World War, he was general secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Upholsterers. After the war, with Bob Shuke and Alf Taylor, he was an architect of the National Labour Agreement that ended the sweat-shop conditions of the furniture manufacturing industry.
His union merged with the National Union of Furniture Trades Operatives (NUFTO), which in turn amalgamated with the woodcutting machinists in 1971 to form the Furniture, Timber and Allied Trades Union (FTAT), he retired to allow space for a younger man to take over his responsibilities.
Noted in the union movement for his academic knowledge of Marxism and labour related questions, he was a committee member of the Marx Memorial Library for over 25 years, for many of which he served as vice-chair, and continued to make contributions to the Library’s journal. He died aged 86