Graham Stevenson

T to Z - Compendium of Communist Biography by surname

The final section of the Communist biographies, surnames from T to Z follows: 71 entries @ January 2008:

Read biographies on the following below:

Annie Taylor, Dr Cyril Taylor, Sammy Taylor Norman Temple, Peter Thiele, E P Thompson, George Thompson, W H Thompson, John `Jocky’ Thomson, Katherine Thompson, Chris Thornycroft, Michael Tippett, John Tocher, Duncan Todd, Dona Torr, Arthur True, Doris Tuchfield, Angela Tuckett, Julian Tudor Hart, Reg Turner, Edward Upward, Shaukat Usmani, Arthur Utting, Tom Vaughan, Pete Venters, Freddie Vickers, Chris Vowles, Bill Wainwright, Bobby Walker, Denver Walker, Iris Walker, Melvina Walker, Les Walkey, Arthur Walmsley, Ian Walters, Fred Warburton, Bill Ward, Wally Ward, Bill Warman, Des Warren, Alec and Ray Waterman, Ray Watkinson, Alf Watts, Frank Watters, Freda Watters, Frank West, Fred Westacott, Joe Whelan, Lewis Whilton, Frank Whipple, Bill Whittaker, Syd Wilkins, Dan Wilson, Dr Alistair Wilson, David Arnold Wilson, Alan Winnington, Ellen Wilkinson, Wilfred Willet, John Roose Williams, Tom Wintringham, Margaret Witham, Jack Woodis, Margaret Woodis, Charlie Woods, Barnet Woolf, Ernie Wooley, Bert Wynn, Lazar Zaidman, Molly Zak, Nancy Zinkin, Peter Zinkin.

Annie Taylor

Sister of the Communist building workers’ leader, Frank Jackson, Annie Taylor was a long-term and hard-working fund-raiser for the Daily Worker and Morning Star. She died aged 91 in 1987, in Brighton.

Morning Star 4th November 1987

Dr Cyril Taylor

Taylor was born in 1921 in New Brighton, Liverpool to Orthodox Jewish parents. His grandfather had fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe to settle in Merseyside. The families name changing from Zadesky to Taylor (Cyril’s father occupation)

In his Youth Cyril was active in the Jewish (Zionist) Youth Movement, attending Zionist habonim camps but soon developed into a socialist. As a sixth former at Wallasey Grammar school he heard a talk about the Spanish civil war and this event had a major impact on his political beliefs. After school he trained as a medical student at Liverpool University, graduating in 1943 and began work at Walton hospital.

He was part of a Socialist Medical Association delegation in 1946 that meet Bevan to urge him not to back down to the BMA opposition to the creation of a National Health Service. Taylor was a pioneer of Health Centres and remained active in the Socialist Medical (Health) Association all his life becoming its President.

After the war he was called up for national service and became a major in the Army which included a period in charge of the British hospital in Khartoum. However on his return he faced victimization in several jobs, including being sacked in 1949 as the Medical officer of the Liverpool Shipping Federation because he was a Communist. So in 1950 he set up his own medical practice at Sefton Drive.

He became active in the Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE) Medical Guild who repaid him by censuring him for referring to his COHSE membership in a Communist Party Liverpool city election address. His house become an open house for Chilean political refugees after the 1973 coup.
The costumes, props and scenery of Liverpool Unity theatre were stored in the house and the garden used for rehearsals. Norah Rushton was a close friend

Cyril left the Communist Party over Hungary and was elected a Labour Councillor for Granby ward from 1965 -1980 and Chair of social services. In 1977 he moved into the purposes built Princes Park health centre in Toxteth, Liverpool. He would joke “I’m Cyril from the Wirral”. Cyril Taylor died in 2000 aged 79

Michael Walker

Sammy Taylor

Sammy Taylor began work as a miner aged 14 and led his first strike at Barnsley Main Colliery aged only 21. He became the Secretary of Brierly (Ferrymoor) National Union of Miners branch from 1942. He was a member of the Communist Party’s Yorkshire District Committee for many years and Chair of his local Party branch in Barnsley Communist Party. When he was aged 40, he fought as the Communist Party Parliamentary candidate for Don Valley securing 1,007 votes. But he was mainly remembered amongst Yorkshire miners as, along with Jock Kane (see separate entry) becoming one of the Party’s trusted officials in the NUM.

In 1954, when Sammy first stood in the NUM’s preferential vote system elections as a candidate for the post of Yorkshire NUM Vice President, there were 45 candidates nominated from 130 branches. Only eight were short-listed and Sammy emerged as the prime candidate against Sam Bullough; the Communist got 13,000 votes against a most right-wing candidate, who polled 27,000. (Bullough became President of the Area in 1961.)

In the end, Sammy Taylor made the first major breakthrough for the Party by becoming the first Communist from Yorkshire to win a seat on the NUM National Executive in 1959. Since the then Vice-President, Bullough, was one of four candidates for the seat, the Party reasoned that, to win, Taylor’s strategy had to be to gain as many first preferences. He was to poll 1,319 votes in the first round against 1,279 for the other three candidates, winning by a majority of 40 votes. It was the beginning of the end of right-wing Labour dominance of the Yorkshire NUM.

In elections for NUM Area Agents, the full-time posts, Sammy stood in his home turf of the Barnsley Area, (known then in NUM circles as the Carlton Area), polling 2,255 votes and being neck and
neck with J. Stone from the strong Frickley (South Elmsall) Area, who
eventually beat Sammy by 186 votes. But Sammy was elected as Compensation Agent in 1961. Communist candidates in Yorkshire NUM elections totalled 11,004, in a very difficult period immediately after Hungary and the Krushchev revelations noted the Daily Express in a story headed "The Reds step up pit drive".

In due course, Jock Kane won a major post in the Area leadership and the entire coalfield tipped to the left, laying the basis for the strong position that Arthur Scargill would later inherit, first as Area President, and later as NUM President.

Source: Frank Watters “Being Frank” (1991); also information supplied by Michael Walker

Norman Temple

Temple joined the YCL during the Second World War and later was a member of the Communist Party’s Executive Committee for 15 years. A stalwart of the Darlington branch of the Communist Party, he was a railway engineering worker. He worked on the LNER line in 1963, at the North Tees depot, where he led a fight against its closure. Temple died on May 24th 1991 at the age of 71 years.

Morning Star 6th June 1991

E P Thompson

Known by the initials of his name as much for the quality of his early historical writing, authored as “EP” and not as “Edward”, Thompson was an important figure in late 20th century left politics. His reputation rests mostly on his written output - poems, novels, works of politics, philosophy, biography, autobiography and mostly his history.

Born in 1924, he was a member of the Communist Party from his student days, Thompson was profoundly influenced by the example of his brother, who was shot as a partisan in Yugoslavia. After Cambridge, he and his wife, Dorothy, herself later to become a highly regarded author on Chartist history, he went to teach in adult education at the extra-mural department at Leeds University, living in Halifax. In the 1960s, Dorothy was appointed to lecture at Birmingham University and the couple moved to Wick, Worcestershire. Thompson then taught at Warwick University

Thompson was an active member of the Communist Party for some dozen or more years, until the events associated with Hungary in 1956, Thompson’s leaving of the Party was to lead to the New Left trend. This was an attempt to build a movement independent of both the Communist and Labour Parties that rested on Marxian traditions but was liberal in character.

He launched the “New Reasoner” in 1956; the Party’s view was that this was factional and inbalanced internal democracy; working class members would not then have had any degree of access to such a means of communicating views and this put Thompson et al in a privileged position. Thompson chose to view this as censorship and promptly left.

Without doubt his single most significant achievement was “The Making of the English Working Class”, first published in 1963. Its impact was monumental in shaping the course of future treatment of social and economic history.

He was especially active in disarmament matters in the early 1980s but this sidetracked into END, and away from CND. EP Thompson died in August 1993, aged 69.

The Observer 29th August 1993

Peter Thiele

Thiele had left Norfolk Labour Party to join the Communist Party in 1956, he had moved to Kingston by 1961 and was a regular contributor to Country Standard, the Party’s rural journal.

Michael Walker

George Thompson

Born in Dulwich, London in 1903, George Thompson graduated at Cambridge. Thomson went on to become professor of Greek at Galway University before moving back to England in 1934, when he returned to King’s College, Cambridge, to lecture in Greek. He became a professor at Birmingham University in 1936, the year he joined the Communist Party.
Thompson pioneered a Marxist interpretation of ancient Greek drama. His outstanding `Aeschylus and Athens’ and `Marxism and Poetry’ both won him international acclaim.

George Thomson lived for part of his life in Dublin and Galway, and became a champion of the Irish language. He first visited the Blasket Islands off the west coast of Ireland in 1923 and spent several years with the people of the islands studying their language, history and culture. He maintained a special study of the now extinct community in Ireland, in which he perceived elements of surviving cultural resonances with historical society prior to the development of private property as a means of production.

In 1951, he was the only member of the Communist Party’s Executive Committee to vote against the Party’s programme, `the British Road to Socialism’, because “the dictatorship of the proletariat was missing”. [Morning Star 9th January 1989] He also served on the Party’s Cultural Committee. The Chinese revolution of 1949 had a profound effect on him and led to differences with the British Communist Party, from which he eventually drifted. However, he never lost his political beliefs and will be remembered for his commitment to working-class education, which included giving lectures to factory workers at Birmingham's Austin car plant He also maintained a special affection and support for the Morning Star in his later years. Thompson died at his Birmingham home on February 3rd 1987, aged 83.

Morning Star 5th February 1987 and personal sources

W.H. (Harry) Thompson

(15.10.1885 – 4.8.1947)

Harry Thompson was born and brought up in Preston.

After attending Preston Grammar School Harry qualified as a solicitor in 1908 and moved to Staffordshire where he was introduced to trade union work by John Ward, the one time Social Democratic Federation and Independent Labour activist who was secretary of the Navvies Union.

When he was called up for service in WW1 in 1916, Harry refused to be conscripted and served several terms in gaol as an absolutist. On his release he set up in practice in London, was solicitor to James Ramsay MacDonald, George Lansbury/ Poplar Borough Council and acted for the councillors in the infamous Poplar dispute in 1921. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he acted for many of the accused in the great sedition trials, including that in 1925, wrote pamphlets for and was an executive member of Labour Research, produced the seminal booklet “Civil Liberties” in 1938, and was a founder member and chairman of the Executive Committee of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now renamed Liberty) from its inception in 1934 until his death in 1947.

Thompson specialized in workmen’s compensation and was the acknowledged expert in the field, waging a long campaign against the iniquities of the Workmen’s Compensation laws then in place, and highlighting and campaigning for those affected by industrial diseases in particular.

Thompson was a member of the Central London Branch of the ILP, one of the branches which seceded to join the Communist Party of Great Britain on its formation in early 1921. He left the party after about two years, but retained close links and was legal adviser to Harry Pollitt and many others within the Party.

One of his sisters, Constance (Connie) married Percy Taylor and produced a child Alan (A.J.P.) Taylor, the historian.

Steve Allen

John `Jocky’ Thomson

Thomson worked as a miner in the Lothian coalfield his whole working life. He joined the Communist Party in the 1940s and was an inveterate seller of the Daily Worker and Morning Star. He was heavily involved with the trades councils in the Lothian region and died aged 73 in 1995.

Morning Star 20th December 1995

Katherine Thomson,

Classical scholar, musician, communist and author of an influential book¬ on Mozart - the composer she most admired. Katherine’s political education began in the early thirties in Germany, when she saw the fascist jackboots on the streets an experience that stayed with her for the whole of her ling life.

Later in the thirties, she married George Thompson (see separate entry) and joined him in the Communist Party in 1940. She helped form the Birmingham Clarion Choir, which became an invigorating, anti-fascist force in the war, expressing the songs of struggle of the labour movement and the international workers’ movements, whilst also inspiring its audiences with music drawn from the classical repertoire. After the war she developed her thesis on Mozart and eventually published “The Masonic Thread in Mozart (1977). In a similar way to her husband, who traced the social origins of Greek drama, Katharine went some way in finding a similar pattern in her account of the influence of underground radical opinions to be found in the work of Mozart.

Katherine celebrated her hundredth birthday on June 29th 2006 but was to die shortly afterwards.

Christopher Hamo Thornycroft

A prominent mechanical engineer, Thornycroft was born in Hampstead on February 18th 1915, and followed the same profession as his father, Oliver. Chris Thornycroft was educated at Bedales, the progressive co-educational school. His great uncle, Sir John Thornycroft, had founded the famous engineering firm; his grandfather, Hamo, had been knighted for contributions to the arts and Chris Thornycroft displayed a blending of these qualities. He had a natural flare for innovative engineering design and dedicated research work.

Chris Thornycroft joined the Communist Party as an undergraduate at Oxford at the school of engineering. He also joined the university air squadron and learned to fly, to assist his ambition to become an aero-engine designer.

He was among the first of the recruits to the International Brigades and used his skills as a mechanical engineer in the Spanish civil war. As he recalled: "I had the feeling there would be no shortage of people who would oppose Franco, but a great shortage of people who knew much about anything technical." Apart from fighting, he was in great demand as an engineer, restoring and repairing outdated weapons, trucks and ambulances, and creating makeshift operating theatres - complete with electric generators.

Based at Boadilla, in the defence of Madrid, he first saw action in November and December 1936. He is mentioned in the book, `Boadilla’, written by his colleague and friend, Esmond Romilly. (See entry for Romilly.) He was also at the battle of Jarama in February 1937, and at Brunete that July. He returned to Britain late in 1937 suffering from typhoid.

After briefly working for a Swiss engineering firm, he served in the engine room of a Cunard Atlantic liner. In 1938, he joined Napier Power Engineering to work on aero-engine design projects, including that of the Hawker Typhoon fighter-bomber and the Tempest fighter, which was effective in stopping the V1 flying bombs.

Thornycroft was sacked from employment with Napiers in 1947, an early victim of the post-second world war purges of Communists and others considered undesirable during the cold war. His brother, Bill, was also sacked by Napiers four years later. Chris Thornycroft remained an active member of the Communist Party for many years thereafter, as he brother recalled “although sticking to his principles seriously reduced his earning ability and his young family had to struggle on a very low income throughout their early years”.

He joined a firm designing agricultural machinery and, in the early 1960s, went to Slough to work with the British Internal Combustion Engine Research Institution at Slough, becoming its director.

He never lost faith in the relevance of the battle for Spain in the larger war against fascism: "Spain wasn't a defeat," he said, "it was a strategic withdrawal." He died, aged 86, on September 11th 2001,

Sources: Guardian October 1st 2001;Letter from F E (Bill) Thornycroft Guardian October 13th 2001

John Tocher

A convenor at A V Roe (now British Aerospace), Woodford, John Tocher was first Stockport AEU’s lay District President and then its full-time District Secretary. He was widely noted for his role in leading the Roberts Arundel strike in Stockport in 1968. The strike, against a bid by an American owned firm to destroy trade union organisation developed into an epic two-year struggle attaining international dimensions. The story of this was written by Jim Arnison in his book, `The Million Pound Strike’. The courage and tenacity shown by Tocher became his stock in trade.

John Tocher at a desk

During the 1970s, Tocher played a key role in the struggle against the Tory Industrial Relations Act. During the often heroic campaign for a 35-hour working week in 1972, when other trade union officials were crumbling, Tocher led a rear-guard action to stiffen resolve, winning more than thirty local employers to concede. Other major disputes he was associated with were the Gardner Diesel Engine sit-in and the Laurence Scott dispute. In 1986, he ensured a major legal fight ensued when Ferodo made a unilateral wages cut. Giving judgement in the case, in which Ferodo had to pay out £750,000, Lord Justice Ognall, remarking on Tocher’s evidence, said that he could well understand why he had been a candidate for the Presidency of the AEU. However, the previous year’s election, won by Bill Jordan as the candidate of the AEU right, was marked by a dirty press campaign, aided and abetted by a shadowy anti-trade union body, Truemid.

But the campaign clearly took its toll on Tocher’s health, if not his spirit. Nonetheless, as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party, he was singled out throughout the 1980s for special attention by the gutter press. He resigned from the Party only because these attacks on him resulted in harassment and began to seriously affect his young family, arising from a second, late marriage. He himself began to suffer chest pains, which revealed a terminal illness. Tocher died suddenly, aged 65, on 17th September 1991, just a week before he was due to retire as North West (No 29) District Secretary of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions and AEU (No 11) divisional organiser for Greater Manchester.

Morning Star September 19th 1991; AEU Journal October 1991

Duncan Todd

Duncan Todd was both a devout Scottish Episcopalian and a respected long-standing Scottish Communist and saw no contradiction in his beliefs. A civil servant, he died aged 64, in 1987 in Kinlochleven, Argyll.

Morning Star n.d.

Dona Torr

Dona Torr was born in 1883; her father was Canon of Chester Cathedral. Completing her studies at University College London, she became a writer and journalist and worked for the Daily Herald. She was against the 1914-18 war and became a founder member of the Communist Party, working on its journal, `Workers' Life’. Later she worked for the publishing company Lawrence and Wishart and married the prominent Communist, Walter Holmes, a long-standing columnist for the Daily Worker.

Despite her lasting, if often muted, reputation as a writer of some substance, she was a dedicated member of the Party, delivering leaflets from her bicycle during the General Strike of 1926 and selling Party literature, especially, later the Daily Worker.

She translated and edited Karl Marx and Frederick Engels' `Selected Correspondence’ (1934), wrote supplementary notes for a new edition of Marx's `Capital Vol I’ (1938), and translated Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ (1940) and Marx's articles `On China’ (1940). She also edited two volumes of extracts from the Marxist classics, published as `Marxism, Nationality and War’ (1940), as well as translating Dimitrov's `Letters from Prison’.

Torr was a key participant in the work of the Communist Party Historians' Group from 1946. She worked behind the scenes to encourage the then younger historians who became so famous.

Dona Torr was captivated by the story of Tom Mann, he was not only a remarkable, seemingly ever-present figure throughout the latter part of the 19th century and the early 20th, she knew him personally and admired him enormously. Little wonder that Torr published, first, a brief biography of Tom Mann in 1936, promising a full length biography. It took her 20 years to finish the first volume and the project was never fully completed.

In 1946 she received help from Yvonne Kapp, but even with Kapp's prompting, Torr still took full part in political activity, writing as homeless families took over unused properties in 1946 that yet another draft would be delayed, this time 'owing to the squatter excitements'.

From 1950 onwards, Torr was increasingly prone to bouts of illness. Despite such setbacks, work continued, and the first volume of Tom Mann and his Times finally appeared in November 1956. The book ends on 16 September 1889 with the victory of the dockers’ struggle of that year.

With the first volume of Tom Mann and his Times complete, but the rest unfinished, Dona Torr died on 8 January 1957.

Torr herself believed that her greatest contribution had come in the 1920s. On her death, Dona Torr's library was donated to the headquarters of the Communist Party in King Street.

Arthur True

Long-term Rhondda Communist and County Council Councillor in Wales for Treherbert, True was a member of the ETU (and its later incarnations). He was also a Communist Parliamentary candidate and, at one point, a member of the Executive Committee of the Party.

Arthur True's election 1970 address

True stood in Rhondda West - Labour held the seat with 74.76%, followed by Plaid Cymru on 14.05%; the Tory got 6.41% and Arthur True, as the Communist, polled 1,201 votes, or 4.78%.

Doris Tuchfield

Born in 1900, Doris was the head stenographer at the Daily Worker and later the Morning Star, where she worked for over 36 years. She had joined the staff of the paper in 1943 and retired on her 80th birthday. Doris joined the Communist party in 1936 and was nominated for membership by Marjorie Pollitt, wife of the General Secretary. She worked for the Engineering Shop Stewards National Council in the early stages of the Second World War. Doris died in 1986.

Morning Star 7th April 1986

Angela Tuckett

Born in 1906, Angela Tuckett became involved in progressive politics very early on in her youth. Her sympathy for Bristol's unemployed quickly became active support for the Welsh contingent on the 1931 Hunger March. She brought food and the 'Daily Worker' to the march every day. She soon joined the Communist Party and, during the 1930s, travelled widely in Europe and the USA. During these years she was involved in the League of Progressive Writers and, with her sister, Joan, in theatrical production in Bristol’s Unity Theatre.

In 1940, as a solicitor, she took charge of the legal department of the NCCL and in 1942 joined the staff of the 'Daily Worker', becoming in turn legal adviser, sub-editor, and staff reporter. Speculation over the mechanisms of links between Soviet intelligence and the Los Alamos atomic spy Klaus Fuchs have suggested that in May 1947, in his attempt to report his knowledge of the bomb, he contacted Angela Tuckett, an old friend, through her sister. Fuchs sought the British Party’s help in passing on information, it is said.

From 1948 to 1978, Angela Tuckett worked on the 'Labour Monthly' and for a time was assistant editor under R P Dutt (see entry). She participated fully for a very long time in the affairs of the London Trades Council, as a delegate.

In the artistic sphere, she was a member of the editorial committee of the William Morris Society, active in the International Concertina Association and the English Folk-Dance and Song Society. A personally quite remarkable woman, she was also a qualified air pilot and an international hockey player.

In 1962 she married Ike Gradwell (see separate entry), secretary of the Swindon Communist Party branch. They worked ceaselessly to build up the branch. Even after Ike’s death, and despite increasing health problems, during her 80th decade she was out busking in Swindon streets playing her concertina to raise funds for the striking miners in 1984. Angela Tuckett died in 1994.

Publications by Angela Tuckett:

“Civil Liberty and the Industrial Worker” NCCL (1942) Civil Liberty in Wartime, No. 1
“The Scottish Carter – the history of the Scottish Horse and Commercial Motormen’s Association 1898-1964” (1967) George Allen and Unwin
“The blacksmiths' history: What smithy workers gave trade unionism” ( 1974) Lawrence and Wishart
“The people's theatre in Bristol 1930-45” (1979) Our History Series No. 72
“The Scottish Trades Union Congress: the first 80 years 1897-1977” (1986) Mainstream

Source: (part) Bernard Barry ”Angela Tuckett -1906-1994 her story” WMCL

Julian Tudor Hart

Born in 1927, Dr Julian Tudor Hart became a physician and epidemiologist and was a long-term General Practitioner in the NHS in the South Wales mining village of Glyncorrwg. He was the son of the Chief Doctor at Motoro Hospital during the Spanish Civil War and an Austrian Marxist intellectual. Like many Communists involved in medicine in the post-war period, in his own practice, he early on introduced the concept of all-round localised medical care. Concentrating on studying how his patients' lifestyles (diet, smoking, and exercise) caused their illnesses, he then worked with them to make their lives healthier.

He is an honorary fellow of the uni¬versities of Swansea, Cardiff, Glamor¬gan and Glasgow and was the inaugu¬ral winner of the Royal College of General Practitioners international Discovery Prize for research in pri¬mary care in 2006. Dr Julian Tudor Hart works in retirement as a research fellow at Swansea Medical School and is an active member of Wales Labour Party. In the 1960s, he was a Communist candidate for Parliament three times and a well-known GP He pioneered commu¬nity control of hypertension and other chronic conditions and is the author of “The Political Economy of Health Care - a clinical perspective” (2006; Policy Press).

Reg Turner

A member of the editorial board of Labour Monthly, founder member of the Artists International Association and former chair of the Communist Party Artists Group, Turner died in Hampstead on April 15th 1995.

Edward Upward

Born in 1903, Upward’s father was a financially successful Romford doctor. During the early 1920s, Upward was an undergraduate at Corpus Christie College, along with Christopher Isherwood. There, he had become attracted to the Communist Party and had attracted much attention as a creative writer of considerable originality. As undergraduates, he and Isherwood produced manuscript stories about grotesques in fantastic situations, produced entirely for friends to read. His first job after university was as a private tutor in Cornwall but he was still preoccupied with creative writing.

Only one example of the product of some of this undergraduate labour of love was ever aired when, in 1929 the short story, “The Railway Accident”, was permitted to be published by Upward. Much of the output had been, in any case, obscene, or at least would have been thought so at the time. One concerned a brothel for necrophiles!

Upward was to be, in old age, the last survivor of a generation of writers who associated themselves with the progressive left. More firmly than most such writers, Upward began attending meetings of the Communist Party in Bethnal Green in 1931 and was actually a member of the Communist Party for 16 years from 1932. He married Hilda Percival, much to his parents’ disapproval since she had been a Communist Party member since 1930 and came from a relatively poor background, in 1936; they were to remain married for the rest of their lives. Hilda came to left-wing politics after her father, a clerk, had died when she was 12 years old and she had then experienced poverty. Her first job was as a teacher in the Old Kent Road, which was when she became interested in the Communist Party.

His stories appeared in “New Country”, Penguin’s “New Writing” and, of course, “The Left Review”. Auden, Isherwood and Spender all regarded him as a literary and political mentor.

In 1937, he wrote “Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature”. In this he now rejected the fantasy writing that he had first made his name with and firmly expressed the view that identification with working class struggle made for more truth in creative writing. The following year, he published his novel, “Journey to the Border”, which illustrated such and approach. On becoming a teacher, he then ceased to produce literary output. He had reached the view that the “dilettante cult of violence, sadism, bestiality and sexual acrobatics” was offensive in an age of the Holocaust, for example.

In the immediate post-war period, along with others, he criticised Harry Pollitt’s “Looking Ahead” for revisionism and the Party leadership for developing into a corrupt elite. Upward was asked to appear before a disciplinary committee and later allowed his membership to lapse; Hilda positively resigned. Edward suffered something of a mental breakdown in this period but returned to his earlier love of writing creatively. In 1958, they both joined CND, whilst Edward’s semi-autobiographical novel, a trilogy beginning with “The Spiral Ascent” was begun in 1962 and completed in 1977. It is, essentially, about the difficulties of being a well-off middle-class intellectual as a member of the Communist Party.
The Upwards lived quietly in Sandown from 1961.

The Independent Magazine 4th September 1993; Morning Star 27th October 1997

Shaukat (pron. Shavkat) Usmani

Usmani's role in the history of the early British Communist Party is so much a vital part of the Party's history, despite his distant connection, it seems churlish not to include him in the compendium of Communist Biographies:

Born in 1901, Shaukat Usmani was an Indian Communist organiser who was sentenced to a total of 16 years in jail after being tried in the Kanpur (Cawnpore) Case of 1923 and later the Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929. During the latter case, he stood unsuccessfully as a candidate in a British general election for the British Communist Party from his prison cell in India in the May 30th 1929 general election for the Yorkshire constituency of Spen Valley. Usmani is believed to be the only candidate ever to stand in a British General Election whilst resident in India. He stood twice as a Communist candidate in Britain once in Spen Valley, the area south of Leeds and Bradford and north west of Dewsbury and north east of Halifax that was then a major textile workers’ centre and again in South East St Pancras.

The Spen Valley seat was significant since it was the focus of an attempt by the leader of a group of unambiguously right-leaning Liberals, Sir John Simon, to get back into Parliament and lead those Liberals who saw themselves as closer to the Tories and who would, in 1931, declare themselves Liberal Nationals and support the Ramsay MacDonald government that spilt with Labour. Simon led the Liberal trend that wanted to abandon free trade and declare support for the immediate introduction of protection as a means to avert the economic crisis. He had been the man who declared in 1926 that the General Strike was illegal, and who in 1930 headed the Commission to report on the situation in India, which became known as the Simon Commission.

Usmani’s selection arose from his prominence in the Meerut trial, which involved 33 trades unionists (three of them Englishmen), mostly well-known figures in India. Because Usmani was a prisoner thousands of miles away, he was unable to conduct the campaign himself, so a deputy to represent him was chosen - one Billy Brain. “All available comrades in the West Riding branches together with Party leaders from London and Scotland led a hectic campaign which focussed attention on the conditions in India and showed that the crime of the Meerut prisoners was that they had sought to organise the Indian workers in Trade Unions in order to fight against the appalling conditions forced upon them by the management of British-owned companies. I went into the area as often as I could to lend a hand. If the people of the Spen Valley didn't know much about Meerut and British rule in India before the election they certainly knew before it finished, and from that point of view the campaign was extremely successful. [Ernie Benson “Starve or rebel” (1980)]

It was common knowledge that Simon secured his Spen Valley seat in 1929, and a resultant cabinet post, as a result of a Tory abstention and many of the Liberal MPs who followed him into the Liberal National group were in a similar position. The formation of the breakaway group had a devastating impact on the future of the Liberal Party by dividing the Liberal vote and emphasising the organisation’s disunity.

Meerut was also distinguished by the fact that it was a Labour government that had given the go-ahead to a political trial of the left. The Meerut prisoners had been arrested on or about March 20th, 1929, amidst wholesale raids and house searches. These arrests and raids were made the occasion of imposing military demonstrations in various places throughout British India. Attempts were made to justify the case by denouncing them as Communists, as many were but many of them had no connection with the Communist movement. For example, Lester Hutchinson, later released as innocent after spending four years in prison, was arrested as an afterthought when he took up the task of carrying on some of the trade union and agitational work after the arrest of the others, was a merely journalist on the Indian Daily Mail and unconnected with the Labour movement.

The trial was long and controversial, enabling the Communist Party to again run Usmani in the 1931 general election for South East St Pancras against a Tory South African mining millionaire who was associated with the Cliveden set. It helped keep the case in the public eye to some extent. But the election of a National Government was not good news for the Meerut prisoners and the case trundled on.

The charge against the prisoners is of particular interest. “That in the year 1921 the … Communist International determined to establish a branch organisation in British India, and the accused … Shaukat Usmani and (others) entered into a conspiracy with certain other persons to establish such branch organisations with a view to deprive the King Emperor of his sovereignty of British India, and … carried out such plan of campaign with the assistance of … the Communist International... the accused formed a Workers and Peasants' Party at Meerut and there held a Conference thereof.”

The complaint was essentially that of "incitement of antagonism between capital and labour", a phrase harkening back to the anti-combination laws in Britain of one hundred years before. The judgement contained the following admission from Mr. Justice Yorke: "As to the progress made in this conspiracy its main achievements have been the establishment of Workers and Peasant Parties in Bengal, Bombay and Punjab and the United Provinces, but perhaps of deeper gravity was the hold that the members of the Bombay Party acquired over the workers in the textile industry in Bombay as shown by the extent of the control which they exercised during the strike of 1928 and the success they were achieving in pushing forward a thoroughly revolutionary policy in the Girni Kamgar Union after the strike carne to an end." Usmani along with two others was sentenced to transportation for a period of 10 years. On appeal, in July 1933, the sentences were reduced and Usmani received 3 years `Rigorous Imprisonment’.

Usmani had been a very early leading activist of the Communist Party of India (CPI), formed in October 1920 in the Soviet city of Tashkent by a small group of revolutionaries and becoming a section of the Comintern in 1921. The émigré party did not have more than 10 members at the time of formation but efforts were undertaken to build the party in India. The British government hit back with a series of legal assaults against CPI – in Peshawar (1922), Kanpur (1924) and Meerut (1929). The accused in the cases included, among others, important Communist organisers who worked in India, such as Muzaffar Ahmad, Nalini Gupta and S.V. Ghate, and members of the émigré party, such as Rafiq Ahmad and Shaukat Usmani.

In the 1924 Conspiracy Case M.N. Roy, (who absconded), S.A. Dange, Muzaffar Ahmed, Nalini Gupta, Shaukat Usmani, Singaravelu Chettiar, Ghulam Hussain and others were charged on March 17, 1924 as Communists seeking "to deprive the king emperor of his sovereignty of British India, by complete separation of India from imperialistic Britain by a violent revolution." In May 1924, four of them, Dange, Muzaffar Ahmed, Gupta and Usmani were sentenced to four years' imprisonment each. By this stage, Usmani was operating underground under the nom de guerre of Sikander Sur. His Comintern code name was D A Naoroji (sometimes wrongly rendered as Naoradji) and he is known to have attended the Sixth Congress of the Comintern.

After Kanpur, Britain had triumphantly declared that the case had “finished off the communists". But a year after, the Communist Party of India was again formally set up at Kanpur itself, in the form of a Workers and Peasants Party. After Meerut and the publicity generated by Usmani’s honorary candidatures in Yorkshire and Yorkshire, the CPI and its descendents would go on to be a major mass electoral force in modern day India in the form of the CPI (Marxist) and the CPI.

Much later in life, Usmani published several books. One was “Historic Trips of a Revolutionary - Sojourn in the Soviet Union”, New Delhi: Sterling Publishers - privately published limited edition, 1977). In this account, written in the mid-seventies, Shaukat Usmani describes three treks across the Soviet Union which he made in the 1920s, soon after the October Revolution. One begins in Peshawar, the second in Karachi, and the third in Delhi. These countries were at the time a part of India, but are now located in modern-day Pakistan. All of these treks ended in Moscow and at one point he describes his meeting with Stalin himself, which takes place during his first journey. During this meeting he negotiates his passage out of the Soviet Union and back to India, since once one established oneself for a stay in Moscow at that time; it was very difficult to leave the city.

He gives an account of his part in the Émigré Communist Party of India, and other examples of progress in his homeland like the Indian Military School. He gives colourful descriptions of his stays in Moscow, during which he lodges at the Hotel Delovoi Dvor (which has a meaning something akin to the “Business Courtyard”), and boards at the Hotel De Lux, once a gathering place for Communist leaders from all over the world. He also describes a trip from Tashkent through the Ukraine to Crimea. This book is focused mainly on the Middle Eastern states of the Soviet Union.

Usmani also published “Four Travellers” [Karachi, Usta Publications Corp. 1950; First English Edition (originally published in 1939 as "Char Yatri" in Hindi and "Char Musafir" in Urdu)] An account of a journey through Jagdalak, Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Tirmiz, Comsomol, Bukhara and Samarkand, this was a fact based novel about the trip of four Indian revolutionaries to the Turkestan republics, the central Asian part of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Usmani died in 1978.

Thanks to Michael Walker for initiating this research.

Arthur Utting

Utting, born in 1918 in East Anglia, was apprenticed in his youth as a carpenter and joiner. During the 1930s, he became active in the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers in Peterborough from the age of 18, and joined the Communist Party in 1940. He was the Party’s District Secretary in South East Midlands from 1952 to 1956.

Often in conflict with the ASW leadership, he suffered two years of suspension from union office in the 1950s. However, the ASW joined with other building unions in the early 1970s to form the Union of Construction and Allied Trades and Technicians. Utting was nationally prominent as the Chair of UCATT national executive council from 1981-82, having joined it in 1973.

In part arising from this role, he was elected to a position as a member of the Management Committee of the co-operative that runs the Morning Star, as part of a strategy of building closer links with the trade union movement and the paper. This was the period that the conflict between the `Euro-Communist’, `revisionist’ Executive of the CPGB and the trade union wing of the Communist Party began to take shape. When it erupted, in 1984, Utting was firm in his support for the big majority of shareholders who had backed the paper’s management.

Immediately before all this, he had retired from the UCATT Executive in November 1983. In retirement, he was particularly active in his local UCATT branch and trades council and died in his early 80s.

Michael Walker (with additions by GS)

Tom Vaughan

Thomas Hugh Vaughan was born in Calcutta (Kolkatta) on May 8th 1911; he studied English at Oxford and was a member of the drama society there. He became a shop floor worker at Morris Motors at Cowley during the war and joined the Communist Party there, which he remained a member of until 1968.

Vaughan went to Yugoslavia as a volunteer building a railway extension line towards Zenica, in the immediate post-war period. He was a lecturer and ATTI (later NATFHE, then UCU) member for much of his later working life at the Borough Polytechnic, teaching maths, later to become South Bank University, where he ran an evening drama group of which the young Richard Briers and Brian Murphy were members.

In the 1950s, he had joined Unity Theatre and was involved in both directing and acting, collaborating with Joan Littlewood. He served on the governing bodies of the Old Vic, Sadler’s Wells and Morley College and as chair of the Royal Victoria Hall Society, which provides grants to small theatres. He wrote several unpublished plays and novels. Married to Esther, he took up the role of Theatre critic Morning Star at age of 70. he died, aged 82, in 1994.

Morning Star 4th February 1994; Guardian 21st February 1994

Peter Venters

A founder member of the Communist Party, Venters attended the various unity conferences leading up to the creation of the Party, in company with William Docherty, Abe Moffatt (see entry for Moffat), Alec Campbell, and Robert (Rab) Smith (see entry for Smith).

Venters was secretary of the Cowdenbeath District Trades Council and secretary of Cowdenbeath National Union of Mineworkers during the formative years of Communist Party dominance of that town. Mary Docherty has recalled that, in the early 1920s period, many Fife Communist Party members were “weak in theory and were militant miners instead of conscious Communists”.

As one of the most committed Marxists in the area, Venters was one of Fife’s most prominent Communist speakers during the 1926-1927 miners strike, although there were many! (For example: James Hope, Bob Lamb, J Mc Arthur, Abe Moffat, Willie O’Neil, Bruce Wallace, John O’Neil, Bert True, Will Crooks, Andrew Jarvie, Tom Smith, Alec Campbell, J Watt, J Gourdie, (Davie?) Proudfoot, Jimmie Lee (the father of Jennie Lee MP), Joe and James (Jimmie) Stewart (the latter becoming a Communist councillor at Lochgelly). Venters died in 1958.

Michael Walker; Source: Mary Docherty `Auld Bob Selkirk: a man in a million’

Freddie Vickers

Winifred (Freddie) Mary (née Lambert) Vickers was born on September 4th 1918 in Liverpool, the youngest of four children. Her father was a customs official and her mother a schoolteacher. Freddie won scholarships to Merchant Taylor’s school for girls in Crosby and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read geography.

There, she joined the Communist Party and became Secretary of the united front University Labour Federation, being a life-long friend of Arnold Kettle from these days. She married James Vickers, later to become a civil service union activist in 1940. In July 1942, she was trapped by burning felled house timbers during a bombing raid on Cambridge. Her injuries necessitated amputation of both her legs below the knees and her subsequent courage in facing the trauma was widely celebrated in the Communist Party press.

After the war, she trained as a social worker at the LSE and then became a psychiatric social worker, first in Stoke-on-Trent and then at Paddinton and Hammersmith hospitals. Freddie became a lecturer in social work at Chiswick Polytechnic. She left the Communist Party over Hungary but never broke with her Party friends. Freddie Vickers died on March 23rd 2006, aged 87.

Guardian 6th April 2006

Chris Vowles

Vowles joined the Communist Party in 1936, after a visit to the Soviet Union, and remained a member of the CPGB until dissolution. Having completed articles in Gloucester before the war, he qualified as a solicitor in 1940. But he was taken on as a mechanical engineer by Dowty-Rotol Gloucester during the Second World War to work on aircraft production, often on around the clock shifts. Whilst there, he became the works union convenor. After the war, he moved to London and joined the Daily Worker as a sub-editor, also running legal advice for readers and checking copy for libel. He met his wife, Joy, whilst working at the paper, who was also a staff member. Going into private legal work in 1947, as part of the Garber Vowles practice, he offered legal advice to working class and socialist minded clients, also specialising in work connected with socialist countries. His firm merged with Jack Gaster’s in 1972.

Morning Star 28th September 1993

Bill Wainwright

Wainwright, who died aged 91 on October 27th 2000, was a journalist and pamphleteer for nearly 60 years. He was elected to the CPGB's executive and political committees and became the party's assistant secretary when John Gollan replaced Harry Pollitt as general secretary in 1956. His final years of full-time party work were spent as assistant editor of the Daily Worker and the Morning Star.

Born on November 24th 1908, he was raised in London's East End. After leaving school he studied chemistry at Chelsea Polytechnic, and became an associate of the Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain. He walked from his home in Stepney to Chelsea during the general strike to avoid using the blackleg trains.

It was the rise of fascism in the early 1930s that was the turning point for him. Wainwright took an active part in this from his flat at World's End, Chelsea, protecting open-air meetings from fascists armed with knuckledusters and truncheons. He went to heckle Mosley at the notorious 1934 BUF meeting at the Olympia in west London, where he was recognised, frog-marched out, and beaten up.

He then became editor of the Young Communist League paper, Challenge, and then the YCL's national organiser. He also met and married his wife Molly, a political and personal relationship that lasted until her death in 1991.

During the war he served in the Home Guard and from 1941 worked on publicity for the war effort at the CP's headquarters in Covent Garden. Soon after the war he became general secretary of the British Soviet Friendship Society. In the 1950s he was involved with the British Peace Committee.

Bill Wainwright

A supporter of the CPGB EC, his role as the Morning Star’s part-time science editor, was ended due to his highly advanced years, although he was reinstated after synthetic protests and played little role thereafter. He supported Democratic Left after 1991.

Guardian November 16th 2000

Bobby Walker

From Edinburgh he saw poverty and unemployment in his youth and joined the Scots Guards to avoid starvation. Seeing the role of imperialism in the colonies turned him towards Communism. This military service made him an invaluable volunteer for the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. After being wounded, he became a machine gun instructor and commanded the British Battalion’s machine gun company in the Ebro offensive. He settled in London after the Spanish war and became an AEU shop steward a Napier’s and later at London airport. On his retirement, he acted as treasurer of the Uxbridge pensioners’ association and chair of the International Brigades Association.

Morning Star 4th July 1989

Denver Walker

Morning Star columnist, Denver Walker, died at the relatively young age of 52 in 2002. He was born in Northern Ireland, but his family moved to Bristol, where he spent a large part of his life, after his father was stationed there by the RAF. A lifelong Communist, Walker started his political activism in the Young Communist League and later the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Denver Walker

Active in a host of campaigns, he took part in the mass action against the US war of aggression in Vietnam and was also active in the Chile Solidarity Campaign after the bloody 1973 coup against the elected government of Salvador Allende. In 1977, he left the CPGB to join the New Communist Party. Walker served both on the NCP central committee and as features editor of the party's newspaper The New Worker.

In 1985, he wrote a semi-humorous investigation into the British ultra-left, “Quite Right Mr Trotsky”, exposing the contradictory positions of the multitude of sectarian organisations. In the early 1990s, Mr Walker joined the Communist Party of Britain, of which he remained a member until his death. He became a contributor to the Morning Star, through his witty column, The World According to Walker, which first appeared in. the paper in 2000.

Morning Star 22nd February 2002

Iris (Deval) Walker

Iris was born on August 11 1920 to a working-class family in the Nechells area of Birmingham. She did well at school, but had to leave at 14 for financial reasons. During the war, she worked in a ball-bearing factory as part of the war effort. She was recruited by the Communist Party in 1942 and offered work in the party bookshop Key Books in Dale End when the war ended.

She was eventually appointed manager of Key Books and her enthusiasm, organising ability and capacity for hard work turned it into the best party bookshop in the provinces. Her first marriage ended and, in 1955, she met Feruccio Deval on holiday at Lake Balaton in Hungary. Feruccio was a teacher, a communist councillor in the Aosta valley in northern Italy and a former partisan leader. A few days after she returned from the holiday, she got a phone call from Dover saying that Feruccio had arrived on his motor bike. They got married in Birmingham and he took his bride back to the Aosta valley on the back of the bike. She found the life there unbearable because of the attitude to women and because it was a very closed society and suddenly decided to return to England. They divorced in Italy, but they regularly exchanged visits until he was too ill and she found that she could not cope with the travel.

On her return to England, she was asked by the Communist Party to undertake work in its press and publicity department and travelled around the country popularising literature in local party organisations and, in her own words, "living out of a suitcase". In 1966, she took over the management of Central Books, which she ran for 10 years. She was elected a fellow of the Association of Administrative Accountants in 1991.

She resigned from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1987 over the dispute with Morning Star, which she supported. Until her illness, she regularly manned the literature stall at the International Brigade's annual memorial gathering in Jubilee Gardens. Iris was a warm, kind and generous woman who loved literature and music and remained a communist all her life. She died in hospital on July 23, aged 85.

Colin Williams Morning Star 31st July 2006

Melvina Walker

Melvina Walker was born in Jersey later she became a lady’s maid and she could recount many a story about the goings on amongst the “High Life”.

Somehow Melvina ended up as a docker’s wife in the East End of London (Poplar) and becomes centrally involved in Sylvia Pankhurst’s East End campaign’s that established a branch of the WSPU in a shop in Bow Road in 1911.

Sylvia recounted the passion of Melvina Walker: "She seemed to me like a woman of the French Revolution. I could imagine her on the barricades, waving the bonnet rouge, urging on the fighters with impassioned cries. When in full flood of her oratory, she appeared the very embodiment of toiling, famine-ridden, proletarian womanhood”.

Sylvia Pankhurst would often send East End working class women like Melvina to talk to women in other branches of the Women’s Social & Political Union in places like Kensington and Mayfair. Sylvia states: "Their speeches made a startling impression upon those women of another world, to whom hard manual toil and the lack of necessaries were unknown." And that she was “one of the most popular open air speakers in any movement in London”.

As the battle for the vote for women increased so did the tactics of the WSPU when the campaign of arson by the WSPU started in 1912, Sylvia denounced it and she was also moving towards a broader “socialist” approach to women’s rights and was calling for a “Peoples Army” to fight against class oppression. When Sylvia Pankhurst dared to speak on a platform alongside James Connolly at the Royal Albert Hall in 1914, a meeting demanding the release of Jim Larkin, arising from his leadership of the previous year’s Dublin Lock-out, she was summoned by her Sister Christabel the self appointed leader of the WSPU and Sylvia and the East London section were expelled from the WSPU.

The East London WSPU now became simply the ELFS – East London Federation of Suffragettes (adding the colour red to the green, white and purple of the WSPU). In March 1914, Zelie Emerson, a fellow member, suggested that they should start a socialist newspaper that focused on the problems of working women. Sylvia Pankhurst agreed and together with a small group of women made plans to produce a weekly paper for working-class women. Pankhurst favoured calling it the ‘Workers' Mate’ but the group preferred the title suggested by Mary Paterson, the ‘Women's Dreadnought’ and the first edition appeared on March 21st 1914.

During the World War I Melvina, Sylvia and other members of the ELFS did much to highlight the plight of East End women many of whom had husbands in the Army, forcing them and their families deeper into poverty. Melvina speaking in 1914 highlighted the impact of profiteering carried out by businesses during the War: “The Sunday joint had doubled in price and it was useless to talk about a scarcity of flour and sugar, there were tons and tons of it stacked up in the docks, our men (dockers) go in and see it, so they know”.

The ELFS during the war focused on relief work, opening an unemployment bureau, toy and boot factory and five children’s feeding centres, which offered free milk to mothers and a nurse to advise them on the health of their babies, a cost price restaurant.

During the War period the ELFS worked closely with dockers, seamen, gas workers, labourers, firemen and post office workers and according moved closer to the official Labour movement, affiliating to Poplar Labour Representation Committee in 1917. However, after the Russian Revolution in 1917 Melvina, Sylvia and the Federation threw themselves wholeheartedly into support for the Revolution believing a Revolution in
Britain was imminent.

They changed the name of the East London Federation of Suffragettes to the Women’s Suffrage Federation (in 1916) and then to the Workers Socialist Federation (1918). The name of their journal also changed from
“Women’s Dreadnought” to “Workers Dreadnought” in 1917. The headquarters of the Workers Socialist Federation was at 400 Old Ford Road.

One of the WSF earliest supporters was Harry Pollitt (later General Secretary of the Communist Party) then living in a basement bedroom in Poplar and working as a ship repairer, he soon became involved in speaking on behalf of the WSF and also in the production of “Workers Dreadnought” Pollitt stating “(The WSF had) some of the most self sacrificing and hardworking people, it had been my fortune to come into contact with” and referring to Melvina Walker in particular, stating “I felt for her the same sort of affection as existed between me and my mother”.

The Workers Socialist Federation where key supporters of the “Hands of Russia” campaign, which opposed military intervention against Soviet Russia. Already Britain had set a number of military detachments to “safe guard” British interests in Russia. The Hands off Russia Campaign was vital in ensuring Britain was not dragged into supporting the counter revolutionaries.

Melvina, as a docker’s wife, and the WSF had strong links with the dockers and seamen and as such were in a position to monitor cargo movements as Pollitt states: “Mrs Walker of Poplar toiled like a Trojan,
On a shopping morning you could rely on seeing her in Crisp Street, talking to groups of women about Russia and how we must help, asking them to tell their husbands to keep their eyes skinned to see that no munitions went to those trying to crush the revolution”.

Harry Pollitt also recalled how he Melvina and Jack Tanner had tried to explain the case for the police strike of 1919 to the dockers, but despite their best efforts they did not have an easy time in persuading them of the merits of this solidarity!

Melvina represented the Workers Socialist Federation at the Communist Unity Conference in London (which helped to establish the Communist Party) the other WSF delegates included Sylvia Pankhurst, and the WSF second in command Nora Smyth.

As the protracted discussions on Communist Unity went on, so Sylvia Pankhurst and the WSF became more and more opposed to any form of parliamentary work and any contact with the Labour Party (The WSF had been expelled from Poplar Labour party in 1919). Sylvia was also refusing to allow the Workers Dreadnought to come under the new Communist Party’s control and while Melvina and other WSF members joined the Communist Party they largely faded away.

The WSF seems to have drifted into further “ultra leftism” by the time Melvina was part of a delegation that approached the Poplar Guardians on 31st January 1922, this time accusing them and Julia Scurr in particular of a climb down in their campaign for full unemployment relief. Melvina stating “you appear to be hopeless and are merely the bulwark between us and the capitalist class to keep us in subjection” the meeting lasted until 4.30 in the morning.

The next day the Times (1st February 1922) stated, “it is the fate of extremists to find their actions challenged by others more extreme than themselves”. Of course the Poplar Guardians/Councillors did make a stand and were duly sent to Prison. Melvina herself was also sent to prison for a month for remarks she made during a speech at Limehouse Town Hall.

Michael Walker

Les Walkey

Shropshire National Agricultural Workers Union activist, being branch secretary of three branches and a life long Communist party member. Walkey was a long-standing member of Shrewsbury Trades Council Executive. A leading light of Rodern Co-operative, he died at a young age in 1956.

Michael Walker

Arthur Walmsley

A life-long Communist, Arthur Walmsley joined the Communist Party in 1924. He was a delegate representing Manchester engineering workers at the 1930 Red International of Labour Unions conference in Moscow. A regular organiser of Fighting Fund collections for the Morning Star at the Eccles AEU club, Walmsley died aged 93.

Ian Walters

Communist sculptor, born 9th April 1930 - died 3rd August 2006.
[Entry in process of research, more to follow, contributions welcome.]

Fred Warburton

Warburton was born on the 11th April 1892, the eighth of thirteen children in a family of strict Methodists in a small town in east Lancashire called Horwich. In 1898, the family moved to Liverpool, then to Manchester and finally settled in Leeds, His father became a strong trade unionist, being a journeyman Boilermaker and began taking the Clarion and reading books like Edward Bellamy’s `Looking Backwards’. His father became a member of the Leeds L.R.C. at a time that saw the Election of the first Labour councillor for East Hunslet.

Warburton left school at 13 and became a `rivet lad’ and later an apprentice rivetter. In 1911, when the engineering unions nationally won a rise of 1/- per week rise apprentices were left out of the deal. Warburton and his mates decided to strike, since his father was the president of their local branch his fellow apprentices thought it fell to him to lead. During the course of this experience Warburton discovered a talent for making an argument.
Once he was `out of his time’ (no longer an apprentice), Warburton had two or three short spells of work in different places before he got a regular place at a repair shop. It was while working at Bia, Peacock’s in Manchester that he met Harry Pollitt, also a boilermaker.

Having joined the Territorials to give himself a chance to travel, Warburton found himself a “reluctant soldier” and was sent to France in April 1915 and then to what was then called `the Near East’ (now the Middle East) and did not get home until seven months after the war had ended. He felt resentment that he had “been robbed of 5 years in a capitalist war”.

He had joined the SLP and was active during the war in propagandising his fellow soldiers. During the Hands Off Russia campaign began, he and a comrade bought two dozen copies of the Herald with the full page `HANDS OFF RUSSIA’ advert and posted them their workplace and on walls in Wakefield where he now worked although the soon found himself unemployed.

After the foundation conference of' the Communist Party, he had taken his Party card in place of his SLP one. He became active in the National Unemployed Workers Committee Movement until the Bradford District Organiser of the Party told him that he had had a letter from Pollitt recommending he work directly for the Party, particularly on Minority Movement work.

Fred Warburton

He began working down the pit at Water Haigh Colliery and was asked to stand for union office but rejected this suggestion lest the taking of office would tarnish his socialist convictions. Through the Minority Movement he met A.J. Cook and after a strong argument he convinced him of the error of such a position.

Warburton became Secretary of the Yorkshire Miners Minority Movement and the main propagandist for the Party throughout Yorkshire. By 1925, he was producing a bulletin sheet called the `Pit-Worker’. The Under Manager at his pit called him into his office and tried in vain to find out who was responsible for the bulletin. On the point of being dismissed and being thus detained, Warburton asked the manger to sign a form to cover half a shift overtime, reminding him that if a man was detained at the pit on matters that were not affecting his work he must be paid and that the Mining Act stipulated this quite firmly. This appeared to stave off attempts to sack him until the 1926 strike took place.

Even so, the war against the rank and file bulletin continued. The manager issued a notice instructing that no paper of any sort could be taken down the pit and doubled the searches on men. All sorts of snap tins (lunch boxes) appeared from chocolate tins to the orthodox ones. Miners were used to carrying paper for `sanitary’ purposes, so the next Pit-Worker had a comment that `Bum Fodder’ would be hung at every gate end. Satire of this sort was loved by the miners and, by now, the Minority Movement had a regular group of 60 that met weekly on a Sunday.

Warburton was a member of the Yorkshire Miners Association and now found himself, along with another comrade, in a branch that had a Labour councillor as its Chairman but was not affiliated to either the Trades Council nor the Labour Party. They became the branch’s first delegates to the Labour Party and Trades Council, a position they both held until expulsion. In 1924, he stood for election to the EC of the Trades Council and received what was then and perhaps still is the highest vote ever recorded. The following year he became Vice President.

Warburton was now travelling to London each fortnight as a member of the EC of the MM. Due to his knowledge of the Unemployment Acts, he was an advisor to the local NUWM. This obliged him to sit on adjudication boards as a workers’ representative, along with one for the employers and a solicitor as chairman. On one occasion, he found that the employers’ rep was a pawnbroker. This enraged Warburton and what followed resulted in him being suspended from the panel for 6 months.

During the General Strike, Warburton was involved in the printing of a Leeds strike bulletin and in the organisation of a Council of Action. He was arrested on the night the strike was over and was bound over to keep the peace.
Warburton visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and fought five local elections for the Communist Party and two for the Labour Party.

Transcribed from a typescript sent by Fred Warburton to Bill Moore.
Roger Boyle, Ford Maguire Society, January 1999.

http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/roger/fms/Moore3.htm

Bill Ward

Known to many for his appearances at Unity Theatre in its heyday and television in later years, Bill Ward became the circulation manager of the Transport and General Workers Union journal, `The Record’ for 15 years.

He was an army despatch driver and lost a leg in the Second World War. Despite this, he resumed performing at Unity as soon as he was able, becoming an Equity member in the process. Radio work followed, although he is best remembered as Owen the socialist in a six month run of the `Ragged Trousered Philanthropist’. One of his last parts was the central character in `The Scavengers’, by Arthur Adamov, in 1963; but his disability restricted the parts he was able to perform and he resolved to find other work to buttress his earnings, the `Record’ job being for three days a week.

He formed Disabled Action, starting by sending a questionnaire to every single MP, then to all large employers, such as the BBC and government ministries. The data he collated, especially of the percentage of disabled employed, was useful in embarrassing some into action. Equity formed a committee which successfully began to persuade casting directors to use disabled actors for parts that did not call for such, as a means of showing a realistic range of humanity. A life-long Communist, Bill Ward died aged 65 of leukaemia on April 25th 1986.

Morning Star 6th May 1986

Wally Ward

A production machine overlooker for the Daily Worker from early on, he had earlier worked for the Daily Herald. Ward was responsible for moving the presses from place to place to escape the government’s prohibition on the paper being printed due to its criticism of policy during the early stages of the Second World War. He was also a member of the auxiliary fire service during the London blitz.

In the 1960s, he was sent to the German Democratic Republic to train on polygraph web offset machines, which were installed at the paper –the first of its kind in Fleet Street. Although having retired in the 1974, his devoted to the paper was such that he would come in as a relief on weekends and bank holidays.

Morning Star 24th May 1989

Bill Warman

Born into a working class family in Norwood, South London, Bill Warman became an apprenticed sheet-metal worker. He joined the Communist Party in 1938 and worked in close association with Jack Jones of the T&G in Coventry when the latter was its District Secretary. Warman was the leading convenor in the Standard motor factory and a key figure in the battles against redundancy in the car industry in the late 1950s and became a highly respected figure in the Midlands labour movement.

Bill Warman

A member of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party for a period, he was Chairman of the Midlands District Communist Party in the early 1970s, he stood several times as the Party’s candidate in Coventry local elections. In the late 1970s, he took the independent Birmingham & Midlands Sheet-metal Workers Union into the National Union of Sheetmetal Workers, Coppersmiths and Domestic Heating Engineers, of which he was lay National President. Retiring after 16 years full-time union work, he became a lecturer for the Workers Educational Association handling shop stewards’ courses.

A member of the Management Committee of the Morning Star in the 1970s, he supported the paper in the conflict with the CPGB EC in the 1980s but maintained his membership of the Party until his dying day.

Both of his marriages were to active Communists; firstly, to Hilda, a Czechoslovak who stayed in Coventry, in the 1940s. His second marriage was to Lorna Bridges, in his late years, with whom he established a Coventry branch of Pensioners and Trade Union Action. He died just two weeks before his 80th birthday and left his body to medical science.

Morning Star 29th February 1988, March 28th 1988 and GS personal knowledge

Des Warren

Des Warren was one half of the Shrewsbury Two, the pair of flying pickets of 1972 who were jailed after one of the tumultuous industrial battles that defined the era of Edward Heath's Conservative government of 1970-74. Imprisoned alongside Ricky Tomlinson, the former building worker turned actor, Warren maintained for three decades that he was the victim of a political conspiracy.

Born on October 10 1937, in Boughton, Chester, Warren was the eldest of three children of a working class family. He left school at 15 to train as a chef in the city's rather grand Grosvenor hotel, before doing national service in the Royal Horse Artillery. Later, he joined the construction industry as a steel fixer and travelled around Britain from site to site. He joined the Communist Party sometime in the 1960s, possible when he worked on the City of London's Barbican development in 1969-70, the scene of numerous strikes. Elected as a shop steward, he was swiftly sacked. He returned to Chester and worked on and off, mostly under assumed names, until the 1972 national building strike projected him into the limelight.

The official strike demanded a minimum wage of £1 an hour and an end to the cash payment system known as "the lump", with better employment rights and an improvement in the industry’s appalling safety record a backcloth to the larger picture. Warren was an energetic strike leader, forever organising pickets and addressing meetings.

Under pressure from the National Federation of Building Trades Employers, which published a dossier alleging intimidation and violence by pickets, the government decided to take a stand, despite claims the incidents were exaggerated. Whilst a national settlement had been achived, for 12 weeks that summer, flying pickets had halted work on hundreds of building sites up and down the country, workplaces normally notoriously difficult for trade unions to organise.

The Home Secretary, Robert Carr, told the House of Commons in October 1972 that he was demanding action from chief constables against flying pickets. Officers from several police forces were based in Prestatyn, to fan out across north Wales and north-west England seeking evidence against ringleaders in the dispute. Among the faces picked upon in photographs shown to 800 people were those of Warren and Tomlinson. The pair were among six people arrested one morning in February 1973.

Initial intimidation and affray charges were dropped, and the two pleaded not guilty that October to offences under the 1875 Conspiracy And Protection Of Property Act, relating to a flying picket sent to Shrewsbury. At one site meeting during the strike, Warren, complaining about poor conditions, had said the site buildings were not fit for burning. During the trial, he was accused of inciting arson. From the dock, after the jury returned guilty verdicts, he declared: "The conspiracy was between the government, the employers and the police. When was the decision taken to proceed? What instructions were issued to the police, and by whom? There was your conspiracy."

Warren was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and Tomlinson to two. An appeal failed and both wore only blankets in protest, refused to do prison work and tried hunger strikes. Demonstrations were held outside the jail and building workers marched from Liverpool to London demanding the release of the Shrewsbury Two. The TUC, however, offered only lukewarm support, in order to avoid a confrontation with Harold Wilson's Labour government, which had by now been elected in February 1974. The new home secretary, Roy Jenkins, point blank refused a General Council request to set the two men free.

In jail, Warren fell out temporarily with Tomlinson, who had dropped a `dirty’ protest and, more significantly, permanently with Bert Ramelson, National Industrial Organiser of the Communist Party, who – seeking to maximise General Council support for the two imprisoned men - had advised co-operation of a sort inside the prison so as not to give the trade union right wing excuses to downplay protests to Jenkins. Warren found only the Workers’ Revolutionary Party calling for a General Strike and denouncing the TUC leadership and promptly transferred his allegiances to them.

Punished with solitary confinement and blocked visits from his family, Warren served all except four months of his three-year sentence. He developed symptoms similar to the Parkinson's disease that confined him to a wheelchair for the final five years of his life and blamed the onset of his ill-health on the tranquilliser drugs administered to awkward prisoners. After his release from jail, he was blacklisted and suffered debilitating ill-health, seemingly turning to religion in his last days.

Trades unionists in UCATT – led by Communists - continued to provide material sustenance to Warren in his declining years, in recognition of the sacrifices he had made and the injustices he had received. 'Dezzie' Warren died on April 24th 2004, aged 66.

Guardian May 1st 2004 and other sources.

Alec and Ray Waterman
(Entry from Pete Waterman.)

My father, Alec Waterman (as he eventually came to call himself) was born with the surname Nasibirski in Blonie, outside Warsaw, 1907. Nasibirski, I was given to understand, was actually a Russian curse: 'To Siberia!’ The main effect of the French Revolution, or Napoleonic invasion, on the Russian Empire seems to have been the idea that everyone should have a registered surname. Jews (like contemporary Icelanders) had only patronymics. Alec's family name was of the kind supposedly given to Jews who failed to pay Czarist officials adequate bribes. Alec's father was a small-holder, a bone-crusher and carrier (carter?). Alec later recalled the smell of human shit the family had to use to fertilise its piece of land.

His peasant background was revealed to us during the war when he cut a potato in four, planted it, and grew whole potatoes from the plants. From the age of three till ten Alec attended cheder (Hebrew religious school). When 15 he joined the Polish Communist Party. He worked, presumably in Warsaw, as a baker and jeweller. At the age of 19, in 1926, he was working in Danzig (since 1945 again Gdansk) as a docker. In this same year he stowed away, with his friend, Alf Holland, intending to go to South Africa.

Arriving in London as an illegal immigrant, he had an introduction to the parents of the schoolgirl who was later to become his wife. Alec first worked as a cutter and machinist in the clothing trade. When he married Ray he was unemployed. Later he got his own haberdashery. He adopted the name Wasserman (from distant family, more Western than Nasibirski?). During the 1930s-40s Alec was successively or simultaneously a member of the British Communist Party, of its National Jewish Committee, of the (Jewish) Workers Circle, of the Friends of the Soviet Union in Stepney, of the Yiddish Workers' Theatre Movement.

He supported the creation in the Soviet Union of Birobidjan - the Jewish Autonomous Region - intended to be Stalin's final solution of the Jewish Question. There was an increasingly strong connection at this time between being Jewish, speaking Yiddish, being specifically working class or generally poor, trade union activism (in the clothing and furniture trades), having Stepney roots, being a Communist and, of course, being pro-Soviet.

He became a member of the ASSET union (managers and administrative staff) and wore its badge. A stateless person in the UK, Alec was registered as an alien during World War 2, required to report weekly to the local police. He did duty in the Auxiliary Fire Service. From 1942 to 1952 he was the General Manager of the best-known Communist bookshop chain in the UK, Collet's. When some serious dispute obliged his resignation, he attempted unsuccessfully to get a job 'in the movement' but had to settle eventually for a shop in Hendon, selling lamps and decorations. This at least permitted him to continue with his political activities and occasional foreign travel.

During the war Alec was involved with the visit to the UK of a Soviet Jewish delegation, making propaganda for the Soviet war effort. Amongst the visitors were Jewish cultural figures, later victims of Stalin's paranoia. After World War II Alec obtained a British passport. This registered his place of birth as Poltava, possibly because this was in Russia, Britain's wartime ally. From around 1948-9 he began to visit Eastern Europe, including East Germany/German Democratic Republic for the Leipzig Book Fair, Russia and Poland itself. As a Yiddish-reader and speaker he had contacts with Jewish Communist organisations, publications and friends in the Soviet Bloc, Western Europe, the US and Israel (where his two remaining siblings lived and which he visited around 1951). He was also one of the British delegates to a (Communist) World Peace Council conference in Warsaw.

Alec was heavily involved in the crisis that broke out in the British Communist Party, particularly amongst its Jewish members and its national Jewish committee following the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, 1956. Whilst Ray and his close Jewish Communist friends, Professor Hyman Levy, Chimen Abramsky (previously a bookseller, later a professor of Jewish history) and others left the Party, and whilst yet others simply towed the party line, Alec spent the following period atoning for his previous acceptance of Soviet propaganda about the Jewish question. In this he was prepared to collaborate with people he would previously have dismissed as anti-Communists. Whilst Jews moved into the middle class and out of the East End, and the Jewish presence in the CPGB declined, Alec became a leading figure in both the Workers' Circle and the national Jewish committee of the Party. The Jewish Question continued to rumble within the CPGB into the 1960s. (My old friend Gavin Williams and I both insist that the other invented the notion that that a 'question' for Marxists is something for which they don't have an answer: the Jewish Question, the Woman Question, the National Question.)

But in 1966, and without any warning, he died on the spot from a massive stroke. He re-appeared in two semi-autobiographical novels, later written by Ray. He also appears, under his fictional name, Morris, in an interview she did for a collection of Jewish women's testimonies. (See below). I consider it something of a blessing that Alec did not live to see Poland made Judenfrei (Jew-free) by the Communists rather than the Nazis (Banas 1977).

Alec brought home from Collet's much 'proletarian literature' from the 1930s US, this being Communist-inspired, or New Deal-funded books and magazines dealing with the lives of workers, Negroes or 'Jews Without Money' (Gold 1930). We also had Emil and the Detective (Kästner 1971) from a mysteriously non-Nazi Germany, and Soviet calendars showing happy and heroic figures - the man in male-superior position - atop electricity pylons.

Alec sang: not only Yiddish but British music-hall, folk and international
Communist and labour-movement songs. Amongst the latter were those from the little red songbook of the Wobblies, the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (1973/1909). Written in the USA around the turn of the century, when the US working class was largely immigrant, often rebellious, sometimes pacifist, these songs were usually based on well-known tunes borrowed from the Salvation Army. They were also full of class-hatred, irony, disgust at popular religion's 'pie in the sky when you die', and utopian hope. Given the virtual disappearance of anarcho-syndicalism as a competitor with Communism, and given their easy singability, we could just as easily adopt them as part of our tradition and culture.

Alec never totally mastered English, mixing his vees with his wubbleyoos in speech, and getting Ray to check his occasional articles for the Communist Press. He remained emotionally attached to Yiddish Language and culture all his life. From him we inherited a love for Jewish humour.

He hardly talked to us about his background or family, even before he knew for certain that both family and community had been removed from the face of the Polish earth. So I didn't know what a shtetl (Jewish village) was till I read Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Alec was a convert from Talmudic Judaism to Talmudic Marxism. I was unable to handle my father's emotionally-violent Communism, even before I began to qualify my own attachment to it. It was therefore as a conscious act of personal reconciliation, as well as out of a sense of political responsibility, that I joined him in yet one more unsuccessful campaign to get the British CP to take a clear public stand against Soviet anti-semitism in the early 1960s.

Peter Waterman

Editorial note: This is a draft extracted from a larger work that the author of this piece is engaged in, he would welcome comments to: p.waterman@inter.nl.net

Ray Watkinson

Raymond Watkinson, who died aged 89, was also a designer, illustrator, typographer, art editor, critic, exhibition curator and, most especially, from 1937, an art teacher. He was born on December 17th 1913 in Flixton, Manchester, into a large working class family of Methodist adherence. Whilst becoming an atheist and Communist in his youth, he never forgot the scriptures!

After Stretford Grammar School studied engraving at the Manchester Regional School of Art he embarked on his long career as an art teacher. Along with Ern Brooks and Barbara Niven, he was involved in workers’ theatre and the AIA. He was a member of the Communist Party’s Hogarth Society. During the war, he was a technical illustrator at Manchester's Avro aircraft factory.

He taught in Manchester, Poole, Watford, Woolwich, City of London Poly, Brighton and the London School of Printing, where he was senior lecturer in the history of art. His last full-time post, in the 1970s, was, briefly, as deputy dean of Goldsmiths College's school of art. He was sacked from his post at Watford, due to Communist Party and trade union activities. Watkinson was a lecturer at the Communist Party School of Art and a key influence on students during the Guildford and Hornsey sit ins of 1968.

Ray Watkinson

An socialist realist, he was an expert on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and William Morris, he published a number of books on both, as well as on William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, Ford Maddox Brown. However fond he was of lesser known artists from the north, Morris - he fondly called him "my friend" - was his greatest hero, and he seemed to resemble the man himself, consciously or otherwise. He was a past president of the William Morris Society and editor of its journal. He was also a Trustee of the William Morris Gallery and chair of the Marx Memorial Library. Watkinson supported the re-establishment of the CPB, described himself as a Communist to the end of his life, and died on January 13th 2003.

Morning Star 24th January 2003; Guardian 6th February 2003

Alfred Augustus Watts

Alf Watts was born in 1862 and was a compositor by trade and a member of the Social Democratic Federation. Later he became part of the leadership of the British Socialist Party (along with Albert Inkpin, the General Secretary, J.F. Hodgson, Fred Willis and John MacLean) as its Treasurer. Watts was a well known opponent of World War One. He attended the Leeds Labour Party Conference in June 1917, during momentous events in Russia, and wrote of the conference:

“(t)here was a fine feeling about the whole show, , and I felt all on the tingle all day … we talked about it all the way home. If it enthused an old cock like me, who is by temperament inclined to look on some of these gatherings with a rather cool and detached air, you may agree it was good … The great thing is for us to get to work, and I hear the provisional committee is up and doing. Locally I think we must get on with it”.

Watts was a founder member of the Communist Party in 1920 and a member of the Unity Convention provisional committee. A Poplar Guardian from 1904-1928, as such he was a key supporter of the Poplar Councillors in 1921 and he himself was elected a Poplar Labour/Communist Councillor from 1925-28. He was also a London County Council Councillor for North Battersea 1919-1925, elected in March 1922 as an openly Communist Councillor along with fellow Communist, J Butler. Alf Watts died in 1928

Michael Walker

Frank Watters
(25.12.20 – 25.7.02)

Frank Watters was born on Christmas Day in 1920 in the Scottish mining community of Shotts in Lanarkshire. His mother, Kate, was fond of saying that all the good people shared his birthday – Jesus Christ and Willie Gallagher, a long-standing Communist Member of Parliament. Maybe the statement summed up something about the family as a whole?

His father was a militant miner, universally known as “Paddy”. Frank’s grandparents had fled the poverty and political volatility of Ireland. Little is known of them, beyond a vague story of a threat of prosecution from a landlord in Ireland for “stealing” seaweed for food for the family. Paddy was victimised after the 1926 General Strike for the high profile he played, especially as a supporter of the Communist Party. After the strike, he was unable to find work as a result and was unemployed until 1938.

Frank’s mother, Kate, bore the main responsibility of raising four boys and three girls, of which he was the second youngest. (The first-born son, Patrick, died in infancy.) Poverty and illness were no strangers to the mining communities of the hungry thirties. The nine of them lived in a two-room cottage, with no domestic plumbing of any kind; the only lighting being paraffin lamps. The whole row shared a midden, an open sewer toilet, out back.

Such deprivation enhanced a quality of resourcefulness in Frank. He ran errands for the old ladies of the village, fetching them tots of whisky from the “snug”, in small jugs secreted under his coat, to consume by their fireplace. Walking greyhounds and performing the undignified task of a trip to the pawnbrokers for the otherwise embarrassed neighbours, all these initiatives earned him a few precious coppers, which he lodged with the local shopkeeper. He planned one year to buy wondrous gifts for the whole family and a football for himself. Normally, an apple and an orange in his mother’s stocking were his only joint birthday and Christmas present and that due to his elder brothers and sisters being able to find work. Alas, when the time came for payout, the shopkeeper told him that his mother’s grocery debts had cancelled out his own credit.

In fact, Paddy’s political and industrial activities initially prevented Frank and his brothers from getting a job in the pits after school. This background was certainly a key factor in his becoming a life-long Communist and trades unionist. All four brothers and three sisters shared similar views; indeed, one brother would become a long-standing local councillor in Shotts. “Vote Watters – Vote Communist” was the local graffiti on village walls for years afterwards! Whenever there was a `meeting of the waters’ – a reference to a fond family ballad – there would be a flowing of the whisky and detailed argument about political tactics and strategy in which all participated, younger offspring of the siblings included. Frank’s story is one of dedication to the struggles of working class people of all backgrounds. Whether you agree with Frank’s life-long passions or not, no one can surely fail to recognise the extraordinary nature of his life.

He joined the Scottish Mineworkers' Union in 1937 and the Young Communist League at 18 and its `parent’, the CP, shortly after. Soon involved in the fight for adult rates at the age of 18 and better health and safety for young miners, he was involved in the formation of the Scottish Young Miners' Committee. Desperate to improve on his meagre state education, Frank was a regular student at the Scottish miners’ annual school, winning places to summer schools such as Beatrice Webb and Ruskin, at Oxford. There was also a strong tradition of self-education amongst Scottish Communist miners and Frank found himself directed by older men to a life-long deep attachment to the huge body of powerful dialect poetry of Robert Burns.

As an underground face worker, he was particular proud of his strong stance in winning miners to boost production as part of the war effort, every ounce of coal made the Red Army’s struggle against Nazism and racism easier, was his rationale. In this period, he suffered at least two serious accidents underground, leaving him with deformed feet and with only a stump of one finger – which he was forever poking vacantly into the air to hammer home a point! The latter accident saw him left unattended in hospital for hours, neglected for cost reasons and undervalued because he was only a `dirty miner’. This experience this left him – like many of his generation - a passionate advocate for the NHS.

Frank left the pits, after 18 years, in February 1953 to work for the CP. His wages were halved overnight. By the end of the year, he was transferred by the Party to work amongst the South Yorkshire miners. It is perhaps difficult at this distance in time to realise the immense importance of the miners in Britain’s trade union movement then, there were, after all, some three quarters of a million of them. Over the next 15 years, Frank was to play a decisive role in achieving a change in the nature of the leadership of the Yorkshire NUM. The CP became an influential force in the Yorkshire area of the NUM due to Frank’s talent for detailed organisational work in internal union elections, which had wider, national significance in the union.

Frank was one of a breed – mostly Scottish – who carved out for the CP a major role in the British trade union movement. The respect for the integrity and devotion of people like Frank eventually ran to the highest levels in the union movement. One such, Mick McGahey, Vice-President of the NUM and Chair of the CP, actually also came from the village of Shotts and he and Frank went to school together. Arthur Scargill, leader of the miners for the last two decades, was one of Frank’s young protégés in Yorkshire in the 1950s.

Their deep personal friendship was only broken in the early 1990s, when Arthur refused to accept Frank’s criticisms of his leading the breakaway Socialist Labour Party, splitting with the official Labour Party. Sadly, Arthur’s hostility to Frank greatly upset him, as he had many political disagreements in his life but never held them as personal antagonisms. However, Arthur’s wife, Anne Scargill, remained a firm friend to the end.

This nurturing of future leaders of trade unions was a special talent for which Frank was widely known inside the labour movement. A generation of leaders owed their status to his guidance – a score or more in the NUM, a dozen senior officials in the T&G, several in Unison, the FBU, ISTC and others.

Frank’s terrain on moving from Scotland was the entire South Yorkshire coalfield, which soon felt his presence. From the late 1950s, one Shotts-like place in particular, Armthorpe, near Doncaster, was turned under Frank’s tutelage into a `red’ village. Communist councillors were elected in straight fights with official Labour candidates. Other parties couldn’t muster the nominations to even stand. Only local government re-organisation in 1973 began to dilute this local strength. Frank would spend many happy New Year’s Eves, on his return to Yorkshire in the 1980s and 1990s, with his close friends, Dot and Eric Browne, who had both been part of the creation of `Red Armthorpe’.

In 1957, Frank married Freda Hartley, after meeting her at a CP event. Two years later, their daughter, Lesley, was born. Freda Watters was the love of Frank’s life. (See separate entry) Cultured and well read, she was admired by many for her humanitarian instincts. It was something of a catch for the rough and ready ex-miner! Even if his mother, a strict Catholic on these matters, disagreed with him taking up with a divorcee who also had a boy from her earlier marriage, `another man’s child’, and then marrying in a registry office!

Fund-raising for the CP and for strikers was always something of a forte of Frank’s. Even as a boy he had distinct commercial acumen. He’d often say that, if he hadn’t have been a Communist, he would have become a rich man! Now with a family to support, moving from Barnsley to Doncaster, Frank had to turn his mind to personal finances.

Too busy with politics to ensure that the funds for his wages were raised, Frank even took up a market stall at one point. Now, even though Frank has spent the best part of half a century away from his native land, he has always kept a distinctive Scots edge to his pronunciation. The initiated will know that the Scots/Irish name of Watters should actually be pronounced Waters. (Most people in the Midlands just pronounce it as it is written.) But Yorkshire folk, in their broad way of speaking, always called him `Whatt-ers’, with a hard sound on the double `t’. Hence the refrain for which he was once humorously famous, owing to this exercise in commerce: “Don’t go round in rags and tatters,
get your shirts and suits from Frankie Watters!”

His innovative style also resulted in a cultural breakthrough when
he helped to get the socialist black American singer Paul Robeson to the Yorkshire mining communities. A signed programme, with a special personal message is still held by Frank’s daughter. Frank himself still retains a deep fondness for the singing of this extra special man and the experience motivated him in later years to engage in similar cultural projects, as well as cementing a life-long and especially deep hostility to racial hatred.

But Frank’s wages from the Communist Party were meagre and that was when he had them paid! Every penny had to be raised from local working class folk, so an offer for a guaranteed income from the Midlands Communist Party was greatly attractive for a man with a wife and two children to support. Thus, in 1968 Frank left Yorkshire for the Midlands where he was firstly the Birmingham and then the Midland District Secretary of the CPGB. After a short while, Freda, Lesley and Peter were able to join him. As a “director” of the Party bookshop, he had been able to convince (the emphasis being more on the `con’!) a building society to loan him the capital for a pleasant home in the Maypole area.

Frank Watters in the early 1960s

Frank’s ability to reach out to people of all kinds of opinions was surely proven when he was invited almost as soon as he had settled in the city by the Rector of St Martin’s in the Bull Ring to share a platform with Bishops and Archbishops at the church. After all, there had even been a vicar in South Yorkshire coalfield who regularly stood in council elections for the CP! The theme of Frank’s “sermon” was the unity of objectives between genuine Marxists and Christians. Canon Green defended his invitation to critical voices in the media on the basis of Frank’s devotion to peace, racial harmony and respect for all faiths. The Canon quoted the then Pope to the effect that Christians must “work with non-believers whose object is to do good”.

One of Frank’s outstanding initiatives was the promotion of the Communist Party’s Star Social Club, built in 1968, which sadly did not survive long after Frank’s return to Yorkshire in 1980. The club united the diverse communities of Birmingham in musical and political endeavour. A weekly folk music club saw many famous names in the Irish community perform, including the Birmingham based “Drowsy Maggie” and members of the “Dubliners”. Members of the famous Campbell family, removed from Aberdeen to Sparkhill, were close to Frank. Ian and Lorna were pretty famous names in the 60s and early 70s, but not as much as the next generation of Campbells – the band known as UB40.

Such a degree of contact, coupled with Frank’s deep association with Irish Republicanism, which went back to his own father’s involvement, saw him reach out to the city’s big Irish community. Especially in 1972, in the wake of the dreadful shooting of 15 innocent protestors for civil rights, which is now known as Bloody Sunday. A massive demonstration of 5,000 was held in Birmingham and Frank was at the centre of it. Then there was also the mobilising of the shop stewards’ movement in the car factories to oppose a fascist inspired assault on the Birmingham Irish after the dreadful pub bombings. Make no mistake, Frank was always opposed to terrorism – but he fiercely supported the minority Catholic community in Northern Ireland in their search for equal rights.

Frank also ensured that the Star Club reached out to the big black community in the city. Twice a week the Reggae Disco took over. At its height no less than 500 young black people crowded into the outside streets, looking for entry, every Friday and Sunday night. It was the focus of the massive campaign in 1970-1 to free Angela Davies, a black American Communist framed on a murder charge and eventually released after massive protests all over the world. A special resonance existed in that she came from Birmingham, Alabama. The internationally famous Jamaican jazz musician, Andy Hamilton, still based in Handsworth, dates his friendship with Frank from this time.

The Star Club was the organisational base for very many political campaigns, strikes and trade union demonstrations. In particular, it provided a forum for debate amongst local trades unionists and was the home for Key Books, at that time the only outlet for the purchase of trade union and socialist books. Every significant union in the city and the region found themselves gravitating towards Essex Street, off the Bristol Road, where the Star Club was based. Frank had particularly special personal links with officials from the builders’ (UCATT) and technicians’ (TASS) unions.

Given the ethnic composition of Birmingham, Frank was strongly concerned at this time, well ahead of opinion then, to promote the idea that the big general unions should take action to ensure that their considerable ethnic minorities were well represented in their leading bodies and officials. One young trades unionist from the city who was a beneficiary of Frank’s support was one Bill Morris, now famous as the black leader of the T&G. Frank followed his progress in the union for many years, so much so that he personally organised, from his base in Yorkshire, the design, printing and distribution of Bill’s election material when he ran for the T&G General Secretary’s position in 1991.

Frank’s interest in Bill arose from the vital political necessity of winning the Midlands’ trade unions to dump the racism that lay deep within their structures. Promoting black and Asian activists within the union movement was critical. In many factories and foundries of Birmingham and the Black Country, most union members were of black or Asian origin. But few shop stewards, let alone branch secretaries, district, regional, national or executive committee members were anything other than white. Frank kept close links and personal friendships with activists in the Indian Workers Association, even though – at the time – some had written off the established unions as inherently white racist bodies. Some robust arguments were had!

The Club became renowned for the vital role it played in the now historic battle of Saltley Gate, during the 1972 national miners’ strike. Frank invited his old friend Arthur Scargill to bring his flying pickets from Yorkshire to demonstrate outside the massive coke stockpile at Saltley Gas works. Scores were put up on the floor of the Star Club and, in a calculated attempt to engage Birmingham trades unionists in support of the picketing, appeals were generated in Labour and working men’s clubs for volunteers to put miners up in their own homes. The political thinking behind such a move was pure Frank. He even organised a friendly baker to donate so many pies, not a few of which ended up on lorry windscreens! But there was little violence then, the strike was pretty popular, devoted as it was to boosting the then dreadful pay of miners. Little wonder then that tens of thousands of Birmingham factory workers poured into Saltley to demonstrate solidarity, causing the authorities to close the coke depot. Within weeks, the miners had won their strike. Thus emboldened, they would be back again within two years, causing Ted Heath, the Tory Prime Minister, to call a general election, which he lost to Labour.

Frank was always a dynamo of energy in whatever he did. His commercial acumen was always at work for the movement and the Party. Not only did he market the Star Clubs ability to put on special licences for union social events, he catered for massive Cypriot weddings. He became known as the `Badge King’, when he utilised the city’s Jewellery Quarter’s virtual monopoly on badge making to produce most of the well-known campaign badges of the 1970s. The campaign against Ted Heath’s anti-union laws saw the appearance of the ubiquitous `Kill the Bill’ badge, hundreds of thousands of which were produced, that helped virtually eliminate the TUC General Council’s weaker `Stop the Bill’ slogan. After the CIA inspired military coup against the left unity government, led by General Pinochet, `Solidarity with Chile’ badges were produced in a dozen languages and sold across the globe.

Wherever workers were in struggle Frank's organising ability was brought to bear. Fire brigade workers were in conflict with government pay policy in 1977, after which decent pay structures were won. Frank was immediately at their side, winning such admiration that, even up to 2001, Frank was a regular honoured guest at their union’s annual conference. In 1980, Frank was involved in the steel workers' strike, organising accommodation and support groups. He gained such respect that he received a range of special awards from the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation and is still thought of with high regard in that union. The importance of this is best gauged by the fact that the organised left has always been very weak in this union, underlining a special feature of Frank’s style of work, whereby he wrote off no section, faction or outlook when it came to working together for the good of workers.

In 1977, Frank’s wife, Freda, was cruelly cut off in her prime. At the age of 52, she died of cancer after a mercifully brief illness. Freda had been a spirited activist in her own right. An assistant social worker, working with the elderly as a carer, and early feminist, she was highly respected for her intelligence and independence of mind. She was herself a committed Communist, who was able to counter Frank’s inability to organise himself (he was forever organising everybody else!) by ensuring he kept body and soul together. Freda juggled the meagre finances of their household and was always there to discuss the politics of his latest campaign and to give support and spirit to him. As Frank has written, “those 20 years which I shared with a stout-hearted Yorkshire lass with a loving personality mean much to me”. It was perhaps a dignified understatement about the cruellest of blows.

This was a period when internal differences within the Communist Party became so sharp that it would split several times and then, after damaging internal conflict, haemorrhage membership, loosing much of the influence people like Frank and many others had won it over decades. Extraordinarily, Frank found himself in trouble with the CPGB EC, by then dominated by the “Marxism Today” faction, for writing a supportive article on the miners’ strike in the Morning Star. An error in quoting the wrong provision in rule meant that his intended removal from key Party committees, notably the “Mining Advisory”, constitutionally should not have proceeded. At the 1987 Party Congress, despite the vicious atmosphere, over a third of the delegates backed him.

He was then asked to recant and refused, after 2½ years the disciplinary action was dropped, but he was kept out of the Mining Advisory. Although understanding the plight of hundreds of Communists who had been unjustly expelled or excluded from the Party, he did not agree at that point with the setting up new parties and continued to argue for struggle within the CPGB against the controlling revisionists.

Feeling closer to the views expounded by the newspaper, the Morning Star, Frank became its regional circulation representative in 1979. In 1980, he decided to transfer back to Yorkshire, performing the same function there. A social event to mark his moving attracted no less than 400 people from all walks of life and opinions.

Actually, the success of this event must have whetted Frank’s appetite for more, since he went on to organise for himself major events for his 65th and 75th birthdays! Then there was the testimonial for his 80th birthday, which attracted several score of unions, branches and individuals to contribute towards a few glasses of “half and a half”`- Frank’s favourite tipple of a half pint of lager and a fifth of a gill of whisky! Actually, Frank’s special talent for organising social occasions went far beyond arranging his own commemorations. All workers in struggle could be sure of his help in setting up fund-raising events. Miners, ambulance workers, the P&O seafarers and many others benefited from this side of Frank. In his last years, he was much immersed in raising funds, medicines and even children’s toys for Cuba. There is an extraordinary photo of muscular FBU conference delegates holding vast numbers of cuddly toys that Frank had cajoled them into buying from local shops, in order to send them on a ship to Cuba! This style of work not only raised much needed finance for good causes but also encouraged social interaction, which in turn helped build solidarity and enhanced consciousness. Frank was all too aware of this process, it brought families and communities into action, deepening understanding and involvement in working class struggles. The very process of having a good time and enjoying vibrant cultural experiences helped people make connections.

Arriving back in Yorkshire in 1980, Frank settled down to combining his new role with his long-held talents. As a circulation representative, few people could claim his zeal in ensuring that union conferences and demonstrations were covered with Star sellers. Indeed, his talent for a sale was so great that many delegates walking to a conference gave in on sight of him! But it went wider than that. In the 1982 health workers' dispute, he played a vital role in bringing the four unions involved together, helping to win them unlimited support and days of action by Yorkshire miners. During their 1989-90 dispute, Barnsley ambulance workers recognised Frank's unstinting efforts on their behalf when, they presented him with an inscribed brief case. He was also involved in raising over £36,000 for the seafarers' hardship fund during their dispute with P&O Ferries. The national Peoples’ March for Jobs, whereby hundred of the unemployed marched from town to town in protest at Government inaction, saw Frank as one of the organisers of the Yorkshire leg. Frank’s friendship with yet another progressive vicar, the Reverend Rodney Marshall, began during this time. He also became an elected Director of the Co-op in Barnsley.

But, of course, it was the Herculean struggle of the miners in the big year long strike to oppose pit closures, in 1984-5, that saw Frank’s unstoppable energy at work in his finest hour. Yorkshire was at the centre of the conflict and local miners were the most solid in the country. Frank was known to be everywhere, keeping up morale and disseminating good advice. In 1987 Frank was made an Honorary Member of the NUM, a rare honour shared with Nelson Mandela, in recognition of his life-long service, but also for his crucial role in the battle for Saltley Gate and his work in the 1984/85 miners' strike. The Midlands Area NUM also marked their appreciation of his efforts in 1972 with the presentation to him of an inscribed miner's lamp.

Frank formally retired at the age of 67 from employment with the Morning Star and there was another of his mammoth celebrations to attend! But he never retired from being active. Far from it, illustrative of his perennial determination, is the fact that he learned to swim, for the first time in his life, at the age of 67. His motive was to be able to swim with his grandchildren and the affair was sufficiently unusual to warrant a half page article in his local newspaper.

Just so was his second marriage at the age of 69. The Yorkshire regional TV magazine programme, Calendar, ran a five-minute piece on the wedding. Frank had met his bride, Esta Meltser, in Bulgaria in the late 1970s. A former teacher of English from the Soviet Union, she and Frank shared holidays for years. It was almost a fairy tale wedding. Their relationship took the form of her spending part of her time in Barnsley and part in Sverdlovsk, her Siberian hometown. Difficulties arising from the political and economic upheavals of recent years in Russia, affecting her son and grandson, coupled with Esta’s own aging, saw them agree to her staying permanently with her family about 5 years ago.

Indeed, Frank was a keen observer of events in the former USSR. He could be said to be a child of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. As he himself wrote, he was never disillusioned. After the 1991 dissolution of the CPGB, Frank joined the Communist Party of Scotland, as an `expatriate’ member, emotionally recalling that that was what he had joined in his youth. He also worked increasingly closely with the nationally re-established Communist Party of Britain, especially in recent times. As a staunch supporter of the Morning Star, he supported the staff when they battled against attempts to sack its editor. He looked supportively to the renewal of the CPB under new leadership and was excited by its increasing focus on and support in the trade union movement.

Frank’s most durable achievement was to write and have printed his own 200 page memoirs, entitled “Being Frank”, which he dedicated to his two grandchildren. Publishing this in 1992 at his own financial risk, he sold no less than 5,000 copies – a remarkable print run by any standards. His self-publishing was sponsored by 35 MPs, 8 MEPs, 11 Barnsley councillors, the entire NUM executive, the leadership of unions such as the T&G, NUPE (now part of Unison), the Fire Brigades Union and MSF. Frank, a man able to call John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, a personal friend, was also able to get John Smith, the then leader of the Labour Party, to be photographed with him to promote his memoirs. The book is now out of print, every copy sold helped Frank enjoy his seventh decade, taking holidays to Cuba, Russia and the Czech Republic and imbibing the odd glass or two of the amber fluid from Scotland!

In his 80th year Frank gradually reached the point where he could no longer keep up the old pace. Walking became more and more difficult for him, home care assistance was laid on. His social worker turned out to be the daughter of a retired Communist union convenor in Coventry! Even after changing her job, she kept in touch with Frank, so well had she and he got on. But Frank’s health was worse than he would admit. Typically, he kept quiet the fact that he had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, arising from prostate cancer. He was the last of his generation and loosing, one by one, all of his brothers and sisters, their partners and a nephew affected him greatly. This has been a tightly knit family, but he was comforted by having the love of all of his nephews and nieces, especially with two of the latter living and working close by in Yorkshire.

But his health deteriorated to the extent that he eventually welcomed the hospitality of Valley Nursing Home, in Birmingham, having moved from hospital in Barnsley. Typically, he arrived in time for the St Patrick’s Day parade! Frank, the working class hero, was so pleased when he discovered that the Matron used to collect glasses at his Star Club in the 1970s and, of course, she and her family remembered him well. “One of his own”, he thought, to look after him in the final months of his life.

Even so, it was a wrench leaving the sheltered accommodation in Barnsley, which he loved living in, especially as it was just across the road from his beloved Swaith Working Men’s Club. But his consolation was that his new home was only ten minutes drive away from his daughter, Lesley, her husband, Graham, and their children, Frank’s beloved grandkids, Ben and Joanne, then aged 17 and 15, all of whom visited him regularly. He was so proud of them, not just in the way all grandparents prize their grandchildrens’ unique talents, but also because they were going to carry on the fine Communist traditions of himself, Freda and the wider family.

His grandchildren joining the reconstituted Young Communist League more than six decades after himself was a matter of great satisfaction to him. He listened with interest, even in his final illness, to their reports of Ben’s role on the YCL EC and Joanne’s phenomenal ability as a `Challenge’ seller on the recent massive peace demonstrations that they both attended. Hearing of each of their insightful spoken contributions to this year’s YCL Congress, he expected nothing less. Chips of the old block indeed!

Frank’s room at the nursing home was decorated with many memories of his long and dedicated life as a bit of a rebel! These displays of a life of struggle helped to stimulate the curiosity of the nursing staff to the history of beliefs of the most remarkable patient they had ever had. Whether it was a nurse from South Africa, or an assistant from Poland, he had something relevant from his long experience to communicate.

Amongst the memorabilia was a picture of Harry Pollitt, hung on the wall above his bed, “none better” said Frank; no Pope above the bed for him! Also, a large portrait of Robbie Burns was placed on one wall. Frank would have been amused with the thought that not only did he share a birthday with Gallagher, but also that he and Burns shared the same day of passing away, July 25th! Ever the one to note meaningful coincidence, he would have been delighted if he had known that he was laid to rest for the period before his funeral in the central Co-op Funeral home –- literally across the road from Saltley Gate.

Like all of us, Frank had his irritating human foibles! Being larger than life even in death he cast a shadow of irascibility, being picked up for his first night in the chapel of rest by the wrong Co-op society, before having to be moved to the correct one! Being moved from the Conservative, middle-class area of Sutton Coldfield to the working class stronghold of Nechells, the area where Saltley Gates were, would have met with his approval. He had many funny stories about the funerals of old comrades. Indeed, he was renowned as the chief organiser and eulogist of many of them, as his own bulk file of funeral orations will testify.

Frank Watters

No one can doubt the sterling quality of his commitment to working class struggle. Not very long before he died, Frank’s daughter, Lesley Stevenson, had the experience of being introduced to an impressed member of the National Executive of the Labour Party as Frank Watters’ daughter. She found herself hearing him being described as a “living legend”.

“The seeds are already sown … the politics of ordinary people will never leave us... Fear not, those of you who are confused and uncertain”, he once wrote in his autobiography. “Being Frank” was its title and, as he himself ended it, “Being Frank has meant being fearless…” Frank Watters was certainly both frank and fearless in his life-long dedication to the interests of ordinary people all over the world.

Graham and Lesley Stevenson

Freda Watters (née Hartley)

Freda Hartley was born on April 4th 1925, in Leeds. Her father, Fred Hartley, had been so confident that the baby was to be a boy that he had declared that he would bestow his own name upon the child. Undaunted, the honour was modified to take account of the femininity that would become an evident feature of the woman. Her mother was Enid Hartley, a formidable woman, who was herself a trained tailoress, and who nurtured four other children. Of Enid, it was said that she was “unique in that she helped develop within her children enquiring minds, which in turn led to enquiries of her own and rapid recognition that a world existed outside her family that required investigation and understanding”.

Aged 11, Freda was to gain a distinction in country dancing with the St Cyprian’s `girls’ friendly society’, again a reflection of a life-long passion for dance. A clever girl, she was nonetheless passed over by the family for entrance to grammar school, due to the cost of uniforms and extras, in favour of her younger brother, who did not in the event pass the necessary examination. The experience helped to form a strong passion for women’s rights and equality very early on.

She was a member of the Women’s Land Army from 7th September 1942 to 6th January 1946, working on farms in the South West of England. She married unsatisfactorily and briefly, the liaison producing a son but ending in divorce. Her first husband remained in the services and it was arising from his being sent to Cyprus, where the `Enosis’ movement for independence from Britain and union with Greece and the communist force, AKEL, were strong, that Freda was forced to examine her own attitudes to British injustices. Remarkably, for a serviceman’s wife in an occupied country, she declared her support for the liberation struggle.

On her return, she worked as a bus conductress for Leeds Corporation and was a member of the TGWU. Typically Yorkshire in her forthright and occasionally blunt manner and, having established a clear sense of her own independence of mind, Freda joined the Communist Party in 1952 and remained a continuous member until her death. Her mother, Enid, who died in 1974, followed her daughter and some of Freda’s siblings into the Communist Party.

In 1955, she married Frank Watters (see separate entry), then South Yorkshire Coalfield Organiser, after their having met at a Communist Party education event at Wortley Hall, near Sheffield. She and Frank settled for a couple of years in Barnsley before moving to Doncaster. During this period, to 1968, when they moved to Birmingham, Freda was the behind the scenes mastermind, who kept the home-cum-office that the Communist Party had in Doncaster going. The frenetic pac