Graham Stevenson

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

Douggie Reid

Dougie Reid was the leading light of the Communist Party in Corby in the 1970 and 80s. He was active in the Amalgamated engineering Union and also stood for election to the local council for the Party.

Dougie came from Scotland like many of the workers that came to work in the steel works at Corby.

Corby Communist Party branch had a membership of around 15 to 20 at anyone time and meet regularly at Dougie Reid's house or at the Trades and Labour Club. The Morning Star was regularly sold in the Town Centre and at the steel works.

Steel manufacturing had started in Corby in 1934 and became the main source of employment. However, in November 1979 the end of steel making in the town was announced and soon 11,000 steel workers were unemployed, sending Corby's unemployment figures in the 1980s to above 30%.

Other key members of the branch were Charlie McIntosh (an ex-international Brigadier) and Stewart Barber, who were involved in the "sit ins" and marches around the rent/rates strike.

Douggie was married to Isobel.

Michael Walker

Jimmy Reid

Born in 1932 in Govan, Reid joined the Young Communist League aged 16 and later became its national secretary. Later, he was a Clydebank councillor for many years until he became the Scottish Secretary of the Party in the late 1960s.

His most prominent claim to fame arose from his joint leadership of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work in from February 1972.

Students at Glasgow University voted him Rector.

He stood three times as a Communist candidate in General Elections for Dunbartonshire in 1970, 1974 (twice). In 1974 he tripled the Communist vote. Reid left the Communist Party in February 1976.

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)

Bryan Robson

Born in 1940, Robson lived in Moorends all his life and worked at first Thorn, then Hickleton, and then Hatfield collieries. The Secretary of Thorne Tenants Association, he studied one day a week at Sheffield University. Robson became charged with replacing Bill Carr as the party’s main electoral candidate and stood unsuccessfully for the South Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council.

Contemporary election leaflets

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

Ted Rogers

Edward Forster Rogers was born in 1918 into a lower middle class Methodist family in Sunderland. After attending Bede grammar school, Ted left school at 16 to enter the building trade as an apprentice bricklayer.

He soon became an active trade unionist and was converted to Socialism by reading Robert Tressell’s ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’. He joined the Young Communist League in 1936 and soon became Sunderland branch secretary. Being secretary of the local YCL led to a chance meeting for Ted with Enid, who he married at the outbreak of war.

Ted first developed his formidable capacity as a site leader for the federation of building unions, while helping to build a big ordnance factory at Swinnerton in Staffordshire. By 1940, he was working on the huge Aycliffe, County Durham ordnance factory and found himself convenor of shop stewards for thousands of building workers at the age of only 22. His legacy as a lifelong organiser lay in a fondness for taking on the crucial backroom jobs that others found too mundane, and in his persuasive charm.

Ted was called up and sent to Mareth in Tunisia as an anti-tank gunner. He loved desert life, sleeping under the stars and making a pact with his mates that none of them would let themselves be promoted.

But Ted's life was transformed when his unit's position was bombed during the allied advance through Tunisia. He was last into the slit trench; while the two men beneath him were unharmed, he suffered severe burns (particularly to his face and hands), passed out and woke up alone in an ambulance being machine- gunned by a fighter. He underwent two years of pioneering plastic surgery; his eyelids were remade from skin taken from his upper arm and extensive operations enabled him to use his hands again.

Despite his damaged hands, Ted returned to the building trade, but moved south to a more favourable climate. He and his wife Enid and their three young sons settled in the new town of Crawley in Sussex. Ted not only had a hand in many of the houses and other buildings but also made an important contribution to the creation of the new community.

As their children grew up, Ted and Enid bought and repaired a £500 yacht then sailed it around the Mediterranean. Adventure found them - they were arrested on suspicion of spying by the Albanian navy and held under armed guard until they could prove otherwise. The Phoenix, a ferro-cement yacht they built with friends, took them across the Atlantic and into the Caribbean (where they were arrested again, this time by the Cubans), Florida and the Bahamas. The adventure came to a halt when the Phoenix hit a coral reef near Cat Island and sank. Unharmed but uninsured, they returned with nothing but their papers and $200.

He did a great deal to establish strong trade unions on local construction sites. He set up the Crawley branch of the Communist Party and was its chairman for many years. He stood several times as a Communist candidate in local elections and organised a number of Daily Worker bazaars. Ted was also active in the tenants’ association, the peace movement, and anti-racist campaigns. Later Ted joined the Labour Party but remained a dedicated reader and supporter of the Morning Star. Having been a founder of ex-serviceman's CND, Ted
was active in CND to the end of his life and still attended his union (UCAAT) branch meetings in his ninetieth year.

When Enid died in 1996, Ted immersed himself in activism. Ted Rogers’ autobiography Journeyman was published in 2003. Despite his heart problems he was still active late last year - challenging Des Browne over the legality of Trident at a meeting with the defence secretary.

Poetry was always in Ted's life: he carried AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad throughout the war and would quote Shelley and Arnold. The day before he died, he recited James Elroy Flecker's Brumana, which now seems apposite for such an adventurer. "Half to forget the wandering and pain/Half to remember days that have gone by/And dream and dream that I am home again."

Ted Rogers died in 2008 at the age of 90 years.

Sources: Grandson Simon Rogers in The Guardian, Friday April 11 2008; David Grove personal knowledge

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

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 Benny knew little of life outside the crowded, squalid environment of Cheetham, a thickly populated working-class district of north Manchester until he won a scholarship to Manchester Central High School for boys.

But he had to leave, just as he was about to take his matriculation exam at the age of 14, when a kind neighbour found a job for him as an errand boy. He had no option, the family was dirt poor, since his father died when he was 12, and Benny now had to help support his widowed mother and family.

Although Benny’s uncle Arthur (Jack) Solomons was intensely political, he did not really directly influence Benny. Jack was, for a few years the national treasurer of the ILP, a friend of Jimmy Maxton and Manny Shinwell and also involved with James Connolly in a big clothing workers’ strike. By contrast, his aunt Ettie introduced him to some Upton Sinclair books and the “Ragged Trouser Philanthropists”. He became an avid reader of similar works. In the summer of 1925, entirely on his own, he cycled to North Wales to see Mount Snowdon; it was the start of a life-long commitment to the outdoors and would lead to his most memorable political act. Benny Rothman would become the prime mover behind the historic mass trespass of Kinder Scout, despite being only 20 years old, a campaign that would eventually lead to the establishment of national parks.

Benny’s first job as an errand boy, for two years, was in the motor trade at Tom Garners’; by 1928, he was an apprentice working in Deansgate, Manchester, and began a YMCA course in geography and economics. His interests alerted Bill Dunn, a member of the Communist Party, and he began discussing the subjects with his young workmate. In 1929 Bill invited him to a local YCL meeting. To quote Benny, he found “they were talking his language” and he gradually became more involved, becoming more and more outspoken on socialism and communism at his workplace.

Bill Dunn also took Benny to the Sunday night forums at the Clarion Club in Market Street, to listen to the speakers there. In late 1929, Benny was arrested for chalking on the Piccadilly pavement “Look out for the Daily Worker – Out January 1st 1930”. Despite the protest of Frank Bright, then organiser of the Manchester CP, Benny was taken to court and fined 7/6d. His position at Garners’ was prejudiced when the Press reported the case and even more so when Benny started selling 50 or 60 of the paper daily. This dwindled after a short while but he still sold a few in the garage. When Garners’ merged with Rootes, rationalisation followed and inevitably the young Communist was one of the first to go; Benny was redundant.

He had acquired a bike (built of spare parts!) He began to explore the countryside, now giving full vent to his lifelong passion for the outdoors. Armed with a 6p Woolworth’s map he spent his 16th birthday climbing alone to the summit of Snowdon. Now a keen rambler and cyclist he joined the Clarion Cycling Club and within minutes of his first meeting became the minutes secretary. Benny had already become a regular on the YCL-organised weekend camps on the Derbyshire moors, held under the `respectable’ name of the British Workers Sports Federation.

In 1931, Benny helped to establish a proper group of the BWSF and soon became its secretary for the North. He organised popular Sunday rambles and camping and cycling weekends in the Peak District, involving workmates from Garners’ and friends from the Clarion Cycling Club and Cheetham. After the Easter 1932 camp at Rowarth the idea of the Mass Trespass took hold and was realised a month later.

A section of BWSF ramblers, being led by Rothman, were 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!

Arguably, the trespassers of private property in 1932 were fighting the same battle as their forebears had generations before, when the Enclosure Acts had been resisted. However, the ambition of the rich in this period was not to gain economically, but to preserve the moorlands for themselves alone. Specifically, the aim was to maintain the grouse which provided elitist shooting ‘pleasures’. Something like three quarters of the southern Pennines and the Peak District was owned privately and the rest was owned by public bodies which admitted no public access. Less than 1% of the moorland was adequately open. Legislation to force land owners to permit the public to partake in their own heritage was the only answer.

So it was that, on Sunday April 24th 1932, ramblers gathered in large numbers at Hayfield, much advance publicity having taken place. One third of the entire Derbyshire Constabulary, under the personal command of the Chief Constable, poured into the village! Ramblers who had come from Manchester outwitted the police, by leaving before the stated starting time by a route through which police cars could not follow. A rally was convened in a nearby quarry, addressed by Benny Rothman. Hundreds of young men and women streamed across moorland, heading for the plateau above Kinder reservoir. They were challenged only by some twenty or thirty gamekeepers. Largely ignoring these, the youngsters reached the top where they met another group which had come from Sheffield, via Edale. (Activists from Derby had tended to join the Manchester group, whilst those from Chesterfield went with the Sheffield contingent.) It was an inspiring moment and the whole event was a bold gesture for “the rights of ordinary people to walk on land stolen from them in earlier times”.

Six young men were arrested after the Trespass and a travesty of justice followed. They were first brought before the New Mills magistrates court. Subsequently, on July 21st and 22nd, the group was brought before the Derby Assizes. A Grand Jury of two brigadier generals, three colonels, two majors, three captains, two aldermen and eleven country gentlemen considered their case. This was no trial by one’s peers; there was not a single working class person and no rambler amongst the jury! They were charged with riotous assembly and assault of a gamekeeper. The most damning piece of evidence, it seems, was a book by Lenin which had been in the possession of one of the defendants. This fact drew the comment from the judge, amidst much laughter: “Isn’t that the Russian gentleman?” Predictably, the ramblers were all found guilty, but sentences of six, four, three and two months jail were imposed. One young man was seemingly extra penalised because he had been selling the Daily Worker.

The campaign did not end there. Apart from the demonstrations and activity designed to draw attention to the injustice of the imprisonments, there were other rambling protests. At the end of May, a massive turnout of over 5,000 ramblers demonstrated for the right of access to private lands at Whatstandwell. Whilst on June 26th, some 10,000 ramblers assembled at Winnats Pass, Castleton. Another mass trespass took place at Abbey brook in the Derwent valley and a rally was held at Jacob’s Ladder. With the more pressing activities on unemployment, anti-fascism and solidarity with Spain over the following years, the issue receded from the minds of the labour movement. But it was by no means in vain, the very establishment in 1949 by a Labour Government of the Derbyshire Peak District National Park, a novel concept at the time, was no accident.

Blacklisted after serving his four months in Leicester jail Benny went at the YCL’s suggestion to NE Lancashire to try and build a branch there. He went to Burnley, to help out with the No Moor Looms campaign. With his zest for sport, he organised some factory football teams and a rambling club but difficulties resulted in their demise. He was involved in the campaign against the 1933 bill to restrict camping to only officially approved sites. He returned to Manchester, after six months still unemployed he worked for a year during 1933 and 1934 for a comrade who had a small garage in Cheetham. He left to get a job at A V Roe’s Ltd (also known as AVRO), the aircraft factory in Newton Heath, where he thought he could do far more industrial and political work. Immediately he joined the AEU’s Manchester 2nd branch he became its minutes secretary and soon was elected to be its delegate to the Manchester and Salford Trades Council. His political activity soon exposed his Communist beliefs and before long the AVRO management found a pretext to sack him.

The political atmosphere in Cheetham with its large Jewish population was strongly anti-fascist and charged with the drive for peace. At this time Benny was active in the Youth Front against war and fascism, which later merged with Cheetham YCL. He involved himself ever more in the YCL and became secretary of the Cheetham branch. He helped to build up the Challenge Club, which in addition to political activities also held social events, rambles, cycle runs, gymnastics, Sunday night dances etc. even building a ‘Flying Flea’. This attracted some 500 members, of whom roughly half joined the YCL. About 75% of the members were Jewish. Probably the appeal of such a broad organisation coupled with the fights against the Blackshirts led by Cheetham YCL contributed to the decline of the BWSF.

At a BUF meeting on Marshall Croft its car was turned over. At another BUF meeting opposite Crumpsall Library Benny was arrested and bound over for 12 months to ‘keep the peace’. In 1933 he intervened when Evelyn Taylor (later Jack Jones’ wife) was physically attacked by BUF stewards as she was heckling Mosley in the Kings’ Hall in Belle Vue. He threw out some anti-Mosley leaflets but then was thrown bodily over the balcony but luckily his fall was broken by a Blackshirt below, The brutality shown at that meeting was reported to a counter meeting that evening in the Free Trade Hall and later to Parliament, which led to the passing of the Public Order Act. Some 60 years later, he recalled some of these events when he was involved in a TUC education project with Danish trade unionists on tackling racism as part of the European Year of the Older Person.

Not long before he left AVRO’s Benny married the mill girl he had met at a peace camp, his comrade Lily Crabtree, who came from a Communist family in Rochdale. They lived briefly in Failsworth, then settled in Timperley in 1936 so that Benny could be nearer his new job as a fitter at Metro-Vicks in Trafford Park. Soon he began selling the ‘Daily Worker’ in the factory, though not openly. He collected contributions regularly in support of Aid to Spain. At a big meeting in the Free Trade Hall he volunteered to be an ambulance driver but was frustrated by not being accepted, largely because he was an inexperienced driver. Moreover it was felt that he could better help the cause through his trade union and factory work.

Shortly before the war, he was victimised due to his politics and then worked at Metropolitan Vickers, in Trafford Park and which had a large Communist Party branch. Metro-Vicks was a conglomeration of factories, then employing some 22,000 workers, the biggest industrial complex in Europe. Just prior to World War II breaking out Benny, after two years as shop steward in his department, became the delegate to the Works Committee for the 800 to 900 workers in the West Works switchgear and about another thousand on radar work in West Works 5. He had won the support of nearly 2,000 workers as a first-class trade unionist ever alert to their interests, especially their working conditions and piece-rates.

But, when Benny condemned Chamberlain for the Munich agreement in 1938, he was called a warmonger and ostracised by his Labour Party workmates; although a year later there was some realisation that Munich had not brought ‘peace in our time’. Again, when the Soviet-German non-aggression pact was signed Benny had a rough time at work, the pact being seen as a sell-out by the treacherous Russians. Benny was very strongly anti-Hitler and thought that the stand taken by Harry Pollitt as to the anti-fascist nature of the war was correct right from the start. He was rejected for the army in the Second World War, being in a reserved occupation, but joined the Home Guard.

In 1942 he helped set up the Timperley branch of the AEU and served 11 years as one of its officials. He later became the AEU’s senior Works Committee delegate. Under his leadership, West Works became 100% trade unionised, a band of united shop stewards had weekly meetings and led every struggle in Metro-Vicks for wage increases, against management manoeuvres to interfere with piece-rates and many other related issues. Benny edited the bulletin to keep their department up to date with authentic information. Small wonder that instead of the agreed one hour a day on union work he would often spend 8 to10 hours, almost full-time! As the war progressed Benny helped to establish a Joint Production Committee and secured agreement on increased output without change to ordinary norms and conditions, which boosted production greatly. On one job the bonus rose by 600 or 700 per cent%! Young women newly recruited into the factory were initially given unsatisfactory low rates. Benny immediately blasted his way through the normal procedures to see higher management. The young women then got guaranteed new prices for their work.

By 1944 Benny was selling daily 70 to 80 copies of the ‘Daily Worker’ in the factory. This was emulated by one his stewards in another department. Some of his stewards joined the Communist Party factory branch there. Strong support was given by Benny’s department to left-wing candidates in local elections. He regretted what he considered to be the Party’s later mistake in switching from factory to area branches, considering that its leadership of the trade union movement in the Metro-Vicks factories was thereby much weakened. After the war Benny was on the Post-War Planning Committee. Without a change to alternative work, redundancies ensued. Over the next 12 months despite Benny’s battle to save the jobs they were lost.

A dispute arose in 1951 when a welder was told to do a fitter’s job. Benny called a meeting – with management permission. The men struck for an hour and the proposal was dropped. The management seized on Benny’s taking part in the hour’s stoppage as an excuse to sack him. Nearly 3,000 men struck immediately to protest at this blatant victimisation. The AEU Manchester District Committee supported the men. They remained out for eight days. The Strike Committee printed leaflets and a small paper called ‘Unity’ in defence of the right to strike and lobbied the AEU EC to recognise the strike. This was refused, although they allowed dispute benefits. The Strike Committee then became the Re-instatement Committee and in March 1952 the 75 AEU Metro-Vicks shop stewards confirmed their view that Benny had been victimised. The management conceded that an application for re-employment for Benny could be considered ‘after a reasonable time’. Reasonable was never defined. Benny started work at Staveley Machine Tools of Broadheath. He had won his point at Metro-Vicks but wouldn’t go back.

Researches are continuing into the archives left by Benny at the Working-Class Movement Library into the years after 1951. These cover his 20 years service as chairman both of the shop stewards committee and convenor at the Kearns-Richards factory (of Staveley Tools) and the Broadheath shop stewards’ forum, his service on the Manchester AEU’s District Committee, at different times as secretary and president of Altrincham Trades Council, on its executive and later on that of Trafford Trades Council and as delegate to the Lancashire and Cheshire Federation of Trades Councils. They cover his leadership of many campaigns for wage and cost of living awards, against redundancies and closures, against the Industrial Relations, Criminal Justice and Public Order bills, his Parliamentary lobbying on these and later on pensioners’ issues. He organised strong groups in Trafford in support of the Grunwick strikers and later of the miners.

Letters from Benny were frequently in the ‘Altrincham Guardian’ and other local papers and he wrote a weekly column for the ‘Timperley Independent’. He edited the monthly newsletter of Altrincham Communist Party and was its candidate in municipal elections for Dunham ward. Benny advised the Communist Party’s national congress, to which he was a delegate, on its resolution on ‘Access to the Countryside’. He advised also on the Party’s Pensioner Advisory Committee. After the collapse of the CPGB he was involved in the Communist Campaign Group’s work which led to the establishment of the CPB.

In 1982 Benny formed the Kinder Scout Advisory Committee and in 1989 the Rivington Pledge Committee and was secretary of both. He led the campaign against the privatisation of water authority land and took part in Public Enquiries on Ashton Moss, Kingswater Park and Davenport Green. He supported the efforts of Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Worldwide Fund for Nature etc. to protect the environment and also fought against the motorway spoliation of the countryside, as at Twyford Down. Ever vigilant on rights of way he also encouraged urban access in his ‘Aspects of Altrincham’ articles.

Prominent in the fight against the military use of Holcombe Moor and other areas of open land and in the CND national action at Coulport on Loch Long, he was also active in Altrincham CND and TU CND and became a delegate to the CND annual conference. He gave slide shows to peace groups to show the true picture of the Soviet view of disarmament. He was a member of the National Insurance Tribunal, the Family Practitioner Committee of Trafford Health Authority and the Pensioners’ Liaison Forum. Yet however prodigiously busy he still made time to tend his allotment and supply tomatoes and other produce to the annual Daily Worker/Morning Star bazaars – the list of his activities seems endless.

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.

Still rambling and campaigning in his early 80s Benny sadly suffered a stroke in 1994 which left him confined to a wheelchair. Not that that stopped him entirely. Together and aided by his dear wife Lily he then fought successfully against a Council proposal to fence in and narrow a path near his home into a passageway, making it difficult for mothers with prams to reach the local primary school. He then retired to Essex with her, to be near his daughter and family. Requests for his advice and help, which he always freely gave, were often been made by outdoor organisations, journalists, students and occasionally by authors. He remained a well-known figure nationally in the rambling and outdoor world and also generally in the environmental field on many different issues.

In 1990 the AEU gave Benny its highest award, the Special Award of Merit. In 1996 the Ramblers Association executive made him an honorary life member. His genial but militant leadership, always based on his close touch with the working class, esured an immense contribution to its history. This selfless, untiring political and environmental workaholic had become truly a living legend by the time of his death, aged 90, on 23rd January 2002.

Even in death, the honours came in. A mountain was even named after him – in Greenland of all places. Jeremy Windsor and three colleagues made the first ascent of the 2,782m peak in eastern Greenland. Tent-bound for a few days, Windsor found a faded newspaper cutting of Benny Rothman’s obituary and read it to his friends. They realised that this was a man who had shied away from the limelight and whose actions had largely gone unrecognised. They decided the best name for peak they had `conquered’ was Mt. Rothman. As climbers who regularly visit crags and mountains in the Peak District, they appreciated the work of Benny and others who organised the Mass Trespass and provided the foundations for the wider freedoms people like themselves now enjoy. [Ramblers’ Magazine February? 2005]

Whilst there’s a train engine too! On 21st April 2007, for the 75th anniversary of the Mass Trespass led by Benny in 1932, the Environment Secretary David Milliband, at Piccadilly Station, Manchester, unveiled on the engine of the Northern Trains locomotive the nameplate ‘Benny Rothman – Manchester Rambler’. This may now be seen regularly on the Manchester – London line.

The Mass Trespass over Kinder Scout in 1932 has been the subject of innumerable articles in many national and local newspapers, magazines and journals etc. It has been the main theme of schools, conferences, seminars, debates and lectures. Books, poems, plays, radio and television programmes have featured it and there is Benny’s own book “The Kinder Scout Trespass”, a truly fascinating historical document.

It is generally accepted now that this historic event paved the way for the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act. April 24th, the date of the Trespass, has been marked over many years by anniversary reunions and celebratory rallies supported by many leading national figures in such organisations as the Ramblers Association, the Peak and Northern Footpath Society, the Open Spaces Society, the British Mountaineering Council, the Council for National Parks, the Peak Planning Board, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, the Country Commission, the Woodcraft Folk, Red Rope, Sheffield Campaign for Access to Moorlands, Benny’s old union and others, and many others in the environmental field. All of them pay tribute to the leader of the Trespass, Benny Rothman, though he would have been the first to point out that he was simply taking part in an historic movement to win the people’s right to ramble freely over uncultivated land – forbidden to them by the selfish, grouse-shooting landowning classes.

Sources: Guardian January 25th 2002; Bernard Barry “Not just a rambler!” WCML Bulletin (1999); Graham Stevenson “Defence or Defiance – a peoples’ history of Derbyshire” (see full text elsewhere of this site) Chapter 11 (1927-1939) section: `The Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout’

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 postgraduate 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

Sam Russell

Sam Russell was born in 1915 to working-class Polish émigré parents and lived in London’s east end. Joining the Communist Party in his youth, he said in retrospect, was quite natural since it was the only party that actively opposed the Blackshirts. He had attended university, where, oddly, he joined the OTC, the officer training corps, where he had learned to shoot. Russell has said that his motivation was partly that he had come across some phrase in Lenin to the effect that a working class that doesn't learn the use of arms deserves to be slaves.

Given this background, it is not surprising that the Party asked Russell to go to Spain in the first group of British volunteers in the International Brigades in September 1936. Russell’s brother also later went to Spain to fight. Sam Russell also met his wife, Margaret, in Spain. Russell recalled: “She was a quite heroic person ... much more than I was." Nurses had it tougher than the soldiers since they had to “handle, day by day and night by night, all the casualties, most of them horrific."

There were 30 British volunteers, not enough to form a brigade, so they joined the French and German brigades; typically most of the British volunteers spoke nothing other than English. This fact further propelled Russell forwards since he knew French from school.

His first battle was at the Casa de Campo, the university campus on the outskirts of Madrid. It was October 1936, the Russian guns were just starting to arrive, much of the ammunition did not fit the guns, and there they were, fighting Franco through the faculties. "Of die original 30, by mid-December only six were left. A few were wounded, most were killed. It was a singular casualty rate in the whole of the French battalion." Russell says he had a relatively easy war because he was injured early; he was shot in January 1937 at Lopera, wounded in the back and the foot. Of the 800 who fought in this battle, barely 200 survived.

After recuperating, Russell asked to go back to Spain and was told he could return, but not as a soldier. He was asked to broadcast propaganda news from Barcelona. It was not only an entry into journalism, it was here that he met Margaret, who had broken her leg. After the war, Russell worked for the Daily Worker and Morning Star until he retired in 1984. Siding with the CPGB EC in the fractional battles of the late 1980s, Russell began to utter retrospective bitter, sharp and highly critical assessments of his life in the Communist Party and experience, eventually, as the paper’s Foreign Editor. In due course, he shifted entirely away from Communism, calling himself a socialist, although he tended to be supportive of Blairism.

In 1996, 60 years after the formation of the International Brigades, Russell was one of the veterans who returned to Spain to be offered honorary citizenship. His belief that the brigaders had been forgotten was completely challenged, amidst the fulsome reception they were given.

Guardian 10th November 2000

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.
Bill Rust fathered a daughter (born 26th April 1925), whom he and his wife named Rosa after the murdered leader of the Polish and German Communist movements, Rosa Luxemburg. (See separate entry for Rosa (Rust) Thornton.) In 1928, Bill Rust went to Moscow, to work for the Comintern, taking his wife and child with him. Once there, Rosa, then three years, contracted scarlet fever. Though she recovered, when she came out of hospital she had forgotten how to speak English. By 1930, Rust’s marriage was over and he had met and married Tamara Kravets (Rust), who after Rust’s death was to marry Wogan Phillips.
On his return, Rust became the Editor of the Daily Worker and presided over its 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. When the decision was taken by the British Communist Party to establish a daily newspaper, the Party had already been 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.
Against the remarkable legacy of what would become today’s Morning Star, some historians and biographers have treated Rust somewhat unfavourably for two things, mainly his stance over the Party’s attitude to the outbreak of war in September 1939 and also what happened to his daughter, Rosa.

As far as the 1939 affair is concerned, 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. Whatever one’s views about Rust’s position on these matters, few could doubt that he now rose to the occasion in by launching 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, now, 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.

As far as the affair of Rosa Rust goes, hindsight criticism has been made easy by the superficiality of assigning to this highly motivated revolutionary the supposed irresponsibility of being a lapsed parent in the context of the highly dramatic circumstances of the historic events that occurred in the Soviet Union in the anti-fascist period. Critics have often contented themselves with implying that Rosa was a victim of Stalinist purges and Rust kept quiet about it. But confusion rather than conspiracy seems to have been the abiding factor. Just as Pollitt seemed not to have harboured a grudge over the unyielding stance Rust adopted in 1939, conceding great praise for the man in his role of Daily Worker editor, so too did Rosa not appear to have held her traumatic experience against her father, unlike academic commentators on his life.

The following appears to be the facts. In 1937, Rust’s first wife visited Britain, leaving their daughter Rosa behind but fully intending to return to the Soviet Union to live with her. In the event, both parents decided that their daughter would be better cared for in the USSR. She was placed in a boarding school for the children of foreign Communist leaders; her fellow pupils included the offspring of Tito and Mao Tse Tung.

However, in the confused circumstances following the Nazi invasion, the sixteen year old Rosa ended up being placed with a set of German exiles who were sent to the Soviet Union’s German speaking republic on the Volga. By 1942, this had become the front line and, out of fear that ome might be tempted to side with the advancing Nazi forces, the community was subject to enforced migration to Kazakhstan, far away from the possible temptation of collaboration. Rosa was by now working in a canning factory and lodged with a German Jewish woman with whom she migrated to the central Asian republic.

Rosa was put to work in copper mines, an ordeal that began to break her health. She wrote to a friend in Moscow explaining her plight and asked for her letter to be forwarded to someone in authority. It found its way to Georgi Dimitrov, general secretary of the Comintern. By early 1943, he had sent Rosa a personally signed pass that enabled her to return to Moscow.

After arranging for the rescue of some of her closest German deportees from the plight they had shared with her, Rosa set sail for Britain. She was 19 years old before she had mastered the English language, which she studied at Regent’s Street Polytechnic. Thereafter, she worked for the Soviet newsagency, TASS, as a translator and married George Thornton. The event was marked by the great privilege, certainly engineered by Bill Rust, of the guest of honour being Paul Robeson. Rosa eventually died in April 2nd 2000, keeping radical left-wing views to the end. Far from blaming her father for deserting her, Rosa’s subsequent trajectory seemed more in homage to his memory than anything else.

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 extraordinarily 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