Graham Stevenson

Beckett’s machine gun jammed as he was trying to keep open the Valencia- Madrid road, with the result that the position was overwhelmed by Fascist troops and he and all of his comrades were wiped out. Clem’s death was front page news in some cities in Britain and many were surprised that he had even gone to fight in Spain. There’s a sense in which Beckett is more representative of the daring young men of the International Brigades than the false image of pale poets that is sometimes offered up. Working class young men in the wake of the General Strike and mass unemployment did surprising things, not only to make a living but somehow the very drama of the times made for great sacrifices, too.

With speedway becoming ever more popular Sheffield once again, a new interest in this star of yester-year is evident in the city’s motor racing community. There is talk of a book about him, his old club speaks his name with pride and even Clem's old crash helmet is held by Oldham Museum.

Brian Behan

Born November 10th 1926, he became a well-known Irish playwright and novelist and inveterate self-publicist. Brian Behan was the younger brother of the more famous Brendan. Their mother had been a courier to James Connolly during the 1916 rising. On immigrating to London to find work on the Festival of Britain construction site as a bricklayer, Brian Behan became an active trades unionist and a member of the Communist Party. His activities saw him briefly in prison twice; once in 1951 arising from a dispute on the Festival site, and again in 1958, after a dispute on the nearby Shell Centre site.

Brian Behan

He became a member of the CPGB EC very quickly but left in 1956, after Hungary, to join the Socialist Labour League (the later Workers Revolutionary Party) as its secretary, although this lasted only a few short years too. After a work injury, he left bricklaying and entered university as a mature student in 1969. Subsequently, after a teaching course, he lectured in media studies at the London College of Printing from 1973 to 1990. He died on November 2nd 2002.

Guardian 5th November 2002

Tom Bell

Thomas Bell was born in Parkhead, Glasgow in 1882, the son of a stone mason and a cotton spinner. He left school at 12 years of age and his first job was as a `milk boy’. He then worked for an aerated water company but was to become an apprenticed iron moulder. In 1900 (or 1901), he joined the ILP, attending economics classes given by G S Yates. Bell became dissatisfied with the ILP’s attitude to trade unions and industrial workers and, in 1902, joined the Marxist Social Democratic Federation. But his continuing views on unions and workers led him, and those who thought like him, to be denounced by SDF leadership as “Impossibilists” and the entire group, led by Yates and Matherson, was expelled at the 1903 SDF conference.

Bell, along with others such as Willie Gallagher and Arthur MacManus, joined the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which was established in 1903 after their expulsion from the SDF. This organisation was also Marxist but was small; it was an overwhelmingly Scottish grouping, although there were also were small groups in Sheffield and Derby. This British SLP also had close links with the Socialist Labor Party of America led by Daniel de Leon.

He was a member of the Associated Society of Iron moulders of Scotland from 1904 and remained active in the union from then on. Bell soon became one of the SLP’s most prominent members, in the process steering it away from the grip of `de Leonism’. Bell was a member of the strike committee during the Singers and Argyle Motor Works in 1911.

An anti-war activist, Bell was also one of the leaders of the Clyde Workers’ Committee and shop steward’s movement during the First World War. When war broke out, he was active in the unofficial workers’ committee movement, first in Liverpool and then in Glasgow. In 1914, he was elected to the Executive of the Scottish Iron moulders but then left Glasgow to work in London and Liverpool.

For periods, he was a SLP propagandist in London and Lancashire. In 1919, Bell became editor of the SLP’s weekly journal, “The Socialist”. Under his editorship, its circulation rose to 8,000 in 1920, when he left the position.

He was also President of the Scottish Iron moulders' and leader of the 1920 moulders' strike, which was successful in obtaining a wage rise for the whole of the engineering industry. He was also active on trade union affairs in Merseyside and Manchester. Bell was a close associate of James Connolly and was Chairman of Manchester Labour College and Plebs League.

He played an important role in the establishment of the Communist Party in 1920, as one of three SLP delegates (Arthur MacManus and William Paul) to the Communist Unity Committee and Convention. He and his fellow SLP delegates’ support for the establishment of the CPGB led to them being expelled from the SLP.

Tom Bell

Bell was a Communist Party Executive member from 1920-1929 and initially National Organiser and was the first official representative of the British Party at the EC of the Comintern. He was editor of Communist review from 1923. During the political show trial of the British Communist Party leadership in 1925, Bell was sentenced under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 to six months in Wandsworth jail, along with Arthur MacManus, J T Murphy, J R Campbell, Robin Page Arnot, Tom Wintringham, Eric Cant. Five others got sentences of 12 months: Albert Inkpin, Willie Gallagher, Harry Pollitt, William Rust and Wal Hannington. (Bell was in the cell next door to Gallagher in Wandsworth jail).

He was head of the Party’s Agitation and Propaganda Department and the Colonial Department at different stages. Despite finding himself a little sidelined by the `bolshevisation’ measures of the late 1920s and early 1930s, he remained a member of the Party with some influence until his death in 1944.

Sources: “Pioneering Days” (first published 1941); Gallacher Memorial Library, Glasgow Caledonian University, Michael Walker, Sunday Worker 25th October 1925

Ernie Benson

The outstanding long-term organiser of the Communist Party during the 1930s to 1950s, in particular. In Ernie’s early days in Yorkshire, he found his first experience of political agitation when pushed to chair a public meeting and then discovering to his surprise that he was a highly effective orator. It was the sort of experience shared by many who came into the party and the labour movement before loudspeakers and microphones.

Ernie was at the Party’s National Congress held in Leeds in 1929, which was attended by the later leader of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht, representing the Comintern.

When hunger marchers from Tyneside arrived in Leeds in 1931 to demonstrate against the means test, the local Labour Party was hostile, to say the least. Ernie Benson, though first rebuffed, eventually won the support of the then Baths Committee chairman, Labour Cllr. Craig Walker, to open the baths for the marchers. Interestingly, Craig Walker later joined the Communist Party.

Ernie went on to be involved intensively in the campaigns of the unemployed, especially regarding “Occupational Centres” and “Test Work” incidents.

Morning Star October 9th 1980

Joe Bent

Born Spencer John Bent, after his father (the name “Joe” being more of a nickname), he was a towering figure in Southwark community politics for a couple of decades in the 1950s and 1960s. Joe Bent had a regular pitch on Sundays at the East St market in Walworth, where he is pictured when standing as the Communist Party candidate for Southwark around 1966. Joe stood in many elections, notably against the notorious Ray Gunter, a vicious Labour right winger and Minister of Labour in the Wilson governments, who thus became the object of particular opposition by Communists.

Joe was a superb orator and never needed a microphone or loud hailer. During the GLC elections, when he stood for the whole of Southwark, Joe narrowly missed by less than a thousand votes from winning a seat, his exact vote is uncertain but I believe it was well over 15,000. Joe’s effective campaigning was backed up by scores of local supporters including the late Nell Vyse, a veteran campaigner for Southwark tenants. The other photo was taken in the 1960s; it is of a meeting held by the Ex-Service Movement for Peace in East St market, Walworth. The ESMP was party dominated and lasted until around 1968, when it was subsumed by Ex-Service CND.

Joe regularly stood in general elections for his constituency; over a period of 16 years he built up a significant vote, more than doubling the numbers and almost reaching 5% of the total votes cast:

Votes for Percentage
Year Joe Bent of total vote

1950 668 1.30%
1955 951 2.39%
1959 1,395 3.57%
1964 1,599 4.91%
1966 1,404 4.73%

In 1970, Joe handed over the role of candidate but a modestly successful Communist vote in the area was bequeathed to his successor. Joe’s last contest was in the 1966 General Election.

Ray Gunter Labour 21,855 73.55%
A P R Noble Conservative 6,454 21.72%
Joe Bent Communist 1,404 4.73%

Joe Bent's father, John Spencer Bent, was awarded the Victoria Cross during WW1. [see http://www.stowmarket-history.co.uk/bent.htm] Whilst Joe himself was also a non-commissioned officer in the Second World War, rising to the rank of Captain, and serving in the desert war. Joe would never talk about the war, or his past, being very much a private man. Joe was also a close friend of Jean Ross (see separate entry), who inspired the character of Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli in the film "Cabaret".

He was always at his best at public meetings where he could really raise a crowd. He took up teaching eventually. Along with Nell Vyse, a veteran Communist tenants’ organiser, he did much for the people of Southwark.

Dick Maunders

Nan Berger

Born on March 8th 1914, near Manchester to a prosperous family, familiarly known to family and friends as `Nancie’, she was married to Roland Berger. Moved to London in 1935, where she and her LSE student brother, Peter, both joined the Communist Party. In 1939, she attended the League of American Writers in the US. In 1940, she joined the Bank of England, promptly set up a staff committee for temporary clerks and found herself summarily dismissed. Her subsequent career as a civil servant in the statistical office of the Ministry of Fuel and Power, eased by the changed circumstances of the later wartime period, was considerably more successful. Though a low graded worker in the Ministry, she developed a statistically valid and rational plan for assuring the distribution of fuel with equity.

When aged only 33, she was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours’ list of 1948, an incredible achievement, especially given the looming frigidity of the Cold War. She maintained a firm belief in Marxism but allowed her status as a card-carrying member to lapse some time in this period. Thereafter, she was a free-lance journalist, for much of the rest of her life. She was editor of “Hospitality”, a hotel and catering management journal and, more solidly, author of a book on the educational and social value of school meals.

Nan Berger

In 1962, Berger joined Helen Joseph on a trip to make contact with banned women activists in South Africa. Nan Berger was co-author of “Woman – Fancy or Free” (1962) and a Penguin handbook on women’s rights in 1973. She died on July 16th 1998.

Guardian 27th July 1998

Claude Berridge

Claude Berridge was born in 1901, according to the 1901 census a Claude Terrence Berridge was born in Leicester and this may well be the same person. Berridge joined the Communist Party in 1920. He later attended the Lenin school in Moscow and became editor of the National Minority Movement journal, the Worker. The National Minority Movement had been established at a conference at Farringdon Hall, London on 23/24th August 1924, attended by 270 delegates representing 200,000 workers. This conference formulated a National Programme of Action, which included a call for a £4 minimum wage, a 44 hour week, recognised workplace union committees and workers’ control. The National Minority Movement’s headquarters were at 38 Great Ormond Street, London.

Berridge secured employment at Napiers factory, Acton, West London but was sacked because of his Communist activities within three weeks of him starting. In 1933, he was elected President of the London District Committee of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), a position he held until 1939. During World War 2 he was appointed as an AEU full time official and had responsibilities for Ford's at Dagenham. He worked closely with fellow Communist AEU activists, Wally Hannington and Joe Scott from West London.

He was elected to serve on the AEU National Executive from 1957 until his death in 1966. A prominent speaker at the TUC Congress, Claude Berridge was also a member of the London District Committee of the Communist Party from 1944 and also a member of its Central and Executive Committees. At his funeral at Golders Green in July 1966, the pallbearers included Wolf Wayne, Dennis Goodwin, Bill Alexander, John Mahon and Pat Devine (Snr).

Michael Walker

J R Betteridge

Born in 1911, Betteridge worked in the tailoring trade until 1948, when he became Secretary of Hackney Communist Party. He stood as the Party’s candidate for Hackney South at the General Election of 1950.

Joan Beauchamp

Elizabeth “Joan” Beauchamp was the sister of Kay Beauchamp (see separate entry), a leading suffragette and a personal friend of the Pankhurst family. She was also one of the earliest women graduates from the University of London.

During the First World War, Joan became active in the No Conscription Fellowship (NCF) founded by Clifford Allen and Fenner Brockway in late 1914, during the early stages of the First World War. The NCF was established to help and give advice to the estimated 16,000 pacifists and socialists who refused to join the military and fight. The Fellowship faced great hostility from police and authorities who regularly raided their offices at 8 Merton House, Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, London and arrested their leaders.

Joan worked at the NCF head office, specialising in the production and distribution of illegal anti-war publications, along with other notable women such as Ada Salter, Gladys Rinder, Lydia Smith, Lilla Brockway and acting general secretary, Violet Tillard, a Quaker who was imprisoned for 61 days and later died in helping Russian refugees during the famine.

While working at the NCF, Joan met William “Harry” Thompson, a lawyer, a conscientious objector and public speaker for the NCF. Thompson was imprisoned in Wakefield jail in 1917 and Joan entered into correspondence with him throughout his two-year sentence. On his release, the roles were reversed in 1919, when the judiciary finally caught up on Joan’s anti-war activities; she received 10 days imprisonment in January 1920.

Joan was a founding member of the Communist Party and maintained a life-long loyalty to it; Harry Thompson never joined but was most certainly a close confidante of Harry Pollitt, the Party’s General Secretary. As “W H Thompson”, he became Britain’s most prominent and renowned labour movement lawyer, a man at the forefront of all the major campaigns faced by the movement in the early part of the 20th Century from the Poplar councillors’ revolt to the Meerut conspiracy trial in India. He was the ever-present legal advisor to every-and-any progressive movement in the period between the two world wars.

Harry and Joan subsequently married at the Hampstead Quaker Meeting House in North London and Joan went on to be a journalist in London. During the Second World War, Joan received severe injuries from a German flying bomb but this did not deter her. When Harry died, in August 1947, Joan was instrumental in encouraging her sons Brian and Robin to take on the practice, and continue in their father’s tradition and commitment.

On his death Robin Page Arnot stated: “Harry Thompson built up a specialised knowledge in workingmen’s compensations – and he did more than anyone else to make this a burning issue”. It is perhaps not too much of an exaggeration to say that Harry Thompson practically invited common law compensation claim route for unions to serve their members who are injured or killed at work by employer negligence. Unquestionably, Harry and Joan were a team and his pioneering legal work for the whole labour and progressive movement was no aberration; the Daily Worker notebook for 8th August 1947 recorded that Joan Beauchamp “was a decisive factor in the success of his (Harry Thompsons) work”.

The firm of solicitors that Harry Thompson founded, with his wife’s strong support, is today probably the largest catering only for trade unions and their members, and one of the largest in the country in any field. It still bears his name and maintains a family connection amongst its partners in the form of the third generation, as well as its politically progressive reputation amongst its clientele and the legal profession at large. An enviable record of tenacity in pursuing employer liability and maximising damages payments to ordinary workers and their families is more than suitable memorial to both Harry and Joan.

Michael Walker - Sources: `The Search for Harry Thompson’; Daily Worker 8 August 1947 [more information on Joan Beauchamp is especially welcomed by this site]

Ken Biggs

Ken Biggs was a lifelong Communist, internationalist, editor of Postmark Prague and Morning Star columnist, who passed away in Prague in April 2006 after a protracted illness. He will be remembered for his unswerving devotion to the working-class movement, his continuing optimism for a better - and avowedly socialist - future and for his lively reportage of the survival of radical Czech politics in the aftermath of the November 1989 counter-revolution.

Ken attended Dulwich College, in South London, in the mid-1950s. Dulwich was then as now, a rather select “Public School” but for some years before he became a pupil, under a socialist head called Patrick Gilkes, it had decided to admit several hundred South London boys who had done well enough on the 11 Plus exam to study there on government scholarships. This was an extraordinary social experiment in what had previously been a traditional public school. It led to deep divisions in the Staff Room. This has all been described in a book about the school and the experiment called “In God’s Gift”. Ken, and his boy-hood friend, Peter Papaloizou (now Loiszos), was one of these scholarship boys. His father was a policeman, in Brixton and was, seemingly, very strict with his son, who was early on, in his own way, a bit of a rebel.

Dulwich directed boys at the age of 12 to start to specialise in the Sciences, in Modern Languages, in Classics, and in History. Ken and Peter were placed in the History stream, of which they did lot. By the time they ended up in the History 5th form, and then the History 6th, they were preoccupied academically with A Levels, and with university Entrance. Dulwich was a very hot school academically and many of pupils were encouraged to try to get into Oxbridge.

Loiszos recalls: “Ken had intense blue eyes, mouse coloured hair, was tall, gangly, very gentle and good natured, bookish and articulate, and passionate about jazz. There was something shy about him, too. As I recall, it was New Orleans and Dixie land jazz, although the small group of us who attended meetings of the Jazz Club also listened to bop, swing, big band, all sorts. We were never more than a dozen and were regarded by staff and fellow pupils as wild, possibly immoral. Jazz already had a public image of smoky dives, drugs, mixed races, and other things which the well bred middle classes were worried about.”

Ken had a very big record collection of a couple of hundred “78” records, the very old fashioned kind, made of a brittle medium. He was known for his passionate collecting. His friend, Peter, lived in a very cramped back-of-shop working class terrace house with his mum, her sister, sister’s husband, and their new baby. He remembers “great warmth, being relaxed, having an ally, a mate. Ken was bright and a good student. We both greatly admired our form teacher, C D A Baggley, a man short of stature but a giant in his authority. He went on to become Head of a top grammar school in Yorkshire. Baggley got us to work really hard on History because we wanted to please him. I am sure Ken and I would read each other’s essays and compare marks. One day I came into school, and there was an odd atmosphere in the classroom. Ken was standing apart, everyone else whispering in a corner. Ken looked a little awkward. I asked someone what was up. `Ken’s sold all his records, and bought the collected works of Marx and Engels’, I was told. There was a general feeling of awe among the rest of the class. It was true.” Peter was to see Ken years later on a demonstration, “So, you’re still a Marxist, then?” he asked. Ken called out: “All the way!

Having joined the Communist Party, Ken cut his journalist teeth on Challenge, the YCL paper, writing a series of insightful and pithy articles for it in the 1950s. In the 1960s, he was a teacher in Coventry and magnificently boosted the presence of the Party through his leadership of tenants’ and other struggles in Cheylesmore, an area of the city not previously noted for its militancy; nonetheless, his vote in the municipal elections rose dramatically with the studious and efficient electoral machine he crafted.

Having thereafter enjoyed a successful career in the Post Office, held union office and worked in anti-racist and solidarity organisations, Ken planned for his retirement in Czechoslovakia and bought a modest apartment in the newly built garden city of Jablonova on the outskirts of Prague.

What should have been a time of relative comfort among his jazz records and books was quickly overturned by the dramatic collapse of the socialist state, the restoration of capitalism and the assault upon living standards launched by the new neo-liberal government.

A lesser man might have packed up his possessions and flown straight back to Britain, together with his new Czech bride, but Ken's instinct was to turn to writing in an attempt to understand the failure of socialism in Czechoslovakia and to stay to fight for the values in which he believed.

The result, launched in June 1991, was Postmark Prague - an eclectic digest of left-wing news and views drawn from across the soon to be separated Czech and Slovak republics. Originally a cut and paste job, quickly photocopied and edited anonymously by Ken alone, the little journal rapidly grew in terms of professionalism, circulation and influence.

Indeed, during the 1990s, when mainstream commentators dismissed out of hand the survival of socialism in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, there was nothing quite like it for Marxist analysis, news and lively comment.

Ken had a true flair for journalism, a keen nose for a story and a rare commitment to recording the experiences of those otherwise silenced and forgotten in the headlong dash towards the free market. As a consequence, lively historical pieces, speeches in the Czech legislature and appeals for help campaigning for the rights of Romanies taunted by racist gangs or for miners newly made redundant jostled side-by-side between the covers of the little paper.

By the late 1990s, many of the best radical journalists in the Czech republic were submitting pieces for publication and an editorial board was established which embraced both members of the resurgent Czech Communist Party and representatives of the British labour movement.

Yet success came at a price. Postmark Prague and, by extension, its editor became the target of organised attacks by the right wing and bands of criminals. A burglary at Ken's home on the eve of the millennium cost him his computer and databases, together with many of his and his wife's favourite possessions. This forced a hiatus in production and a consequent loss of momentum, from which the journal never really recovered.

Deteriorating health, the death of his much-loved mother and spiralling production costs finally forced the closure of the paper in December 2002. Yet help was at hand from the Morning Star, which, to its great credit, recognised the value of his work and offered Ken a regular column in its pages. In this manner, the name of Postmark Prague survived for several more years and opened a window onto events in central Europe for British readers that transcended the journal's original circle of subscribers.

An Englishman by birth, an internationalist by inclination and a true friend to the Czech people by both sentiment and deeds, Ken managed to fan the embers of socialism in the most difficult of times and to recreate a genuine sense of radical identity and pride among his readership. Not least among his achievements was his work in preparing a fresh, uncut, edition of Julius Fucik's Report from the Gallows, which brought the words and sacrifice of an anti-fascist fighter fresh to a new generation of activists.

Those of us who had the pleasure to know him, to walk alongside him through the true Prague of beauty and horror, struggle and heroism - a million miles removed from the tourist traps and stag nights - will remember him as a generous, passionate and thoroughly humane individual who combined the best instincts and virtues of the British working class.

Sources: John Callow obituary, Morning Star Friday 26 May 2006; additional material: `Reminiscences of Ken Biggs – Dulwich College 1955-56’ – by Peter Loizos (Papaloizou), personal knowledge of GS

Reg Birch

Born 7th June 1914 and grew up in Kilburn, north west London. His father was a small jobbing builder, who died in 1929. Reg left school to become an apprentice toolmaker and immediately joined the AEU. He became increasingly active and then prominent in the London North District of the union during the 1930s, leading to his joining the Communist Party in 1939.

In 1941, he was already an Acting Steward in Swift’s scale-making factory in the Park Royal area (the heart of the engineering world of west London, which Birch became particularly associated with), when a dispute broke out for the reinstatement of a sacked convenor. Despite the wartime restrictions of Order No. 1305, preventing industrial disputes, the Works Committee at Swift’s called for a “complete holiday” for all unless reinstatement occurred. In the subsequent legal case, Birch defended himself, but leniency was in any case applied all round, for reasons of politics.

That year, he was elected President of the North London AEU, a position he retained until be became a full-timer for the union. In 1942, he began working at Landis & Gyr, also in the Park Royal area. Within two years he was sacked and then reinstated as solidarity action was undertaken. He became a member of the prestigious National Committee of the AEU in 1943 and was repeatedly re-elected up until 1960, when he became a fulltime official. Immediately the war was over, he secured employment at Havilland Engines and was there without a break to 1960, he was also convenor of shop stewards for all that time from 1946.

He visited the USSR on an AEU delegation in 1946 and Hungary the same year. Whilst he subsequently claimed to have been an opponent of the British Road to Socialism from 1950, he served on the Communist Party Executive Committee from 1957 and was especially supportive of the line that backed Soviet intervention against a counter-revolution.

Birch first contested the Presidency of the AEU against Bill Carron in 1956 but lost decisively. In 1960, he was elected Divisional Organiser of London North. He again ran for the Presidency, unsuccessfully, in 1964 but this time the result was much narrower. Birch was elected in membership ballots an AUEW (the new name of the union) delegate to the TUC in 1966, 1967 and 1968.

A secure base for his leadership ambitions was won when he was elected to the AEU Executive Committee, a fulltime post, for the London and South East seat in 1966, a seat he retained until his retirement in 1979.

In 1967, the Communist Party’s Engineering Advisory split 24 votes to 16 on the question of who to support for the Presidency. The majority favoured backed former Party member, Hugh Scanlon, as a contribution to building a broad left alliance and as a more likely winner. Events proved the majority absolutely right, but not before Birch had stood as a candidate against Party policy, although his vote trailed very badly indeed.

Expulsion from the Communist Party was inevitable and now Birch’s unexpurgated sectarianism came out for all to see. He was agitating for the foundation of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) in September 1967. In the following year, he and others had formed this party and Birch was CPB M-L Chair from 1968 to 1985.

Notwithstanding this shift in direction, Birch’s west London base and EC seat gave him a big enough role in the 1970s. During this period, he was Secretary of the trend-setting trade union side of the Ford NNC, forging a reputation for crafty yet witty negotiating techniques and was a member of the TUC General Council from 1975 to 1979. In retirement, he was solely concerned with the activities of his party, which never numbered more than a couple of hundred at the very most and was much reduced following his retirement from the front rank. Birch died on 1st June 1994.

“Reg Birch: Engineer, Trade Unionist and Communist” Will Podmore, Bellman Books (2004)

Maurice (Morrie) Blaston

Blaston was a life-long Communist and a leader of the tailor and garment workers, awarded the TUC Gold Badge for services top trades unionism. He was an elected Communist councillor for Hackney from 1948 to 1956 and died in 1987, aged 88.

Source: Morning Star 3rd February 1987

Dickie Bond

Cecil, Cyril, Dick, or more commonly Dickie Bond, was a leading member of the Communist Party in Uxbridge, the Electricians Union and, later, the Pensioners’ Federation. Born in Cowley, Uxbridge on Good Friday, 13th April 1900 he lived in a small cottage in Clements, in Cowley.

His father, who could not read or write, was a farm labourer toiling long hours in the fields for low pay for a farmer called Richardson. His mother worked in the kitchens of Cowley House for the Countess of Essex. Dickie recalled sitting at the back step of the House waiting for the left-overs his mother could spirit away. “When I came home from school I used to wait and see if she had brought any scraps from the kitchen … that was how it was, that's why I am a socialist."
He attended the Hillingdon Road School and greatly enjoyed it. At the age of 12, his family moved a few miles down the road to Uxbridge.

In his early years Dickie frequented the Friends’ Meeting House and it was here he meet sympathetic educated people. Dickie considered the Quakers a "very intelligent people" and his socialism grew from the altruism which he became exposed to. In his youth, Dickie was a very keen sportsman, and in particular cycling, at which he was proud to represent the British Workers Sports Federation in the Moscow Workers Olympics of 1929 and again at the Paris Workers Olympics in 1930. The Federation had been established in 1923 out of some locals of the earlier Clarion Cycling Club, Labour Party sympathisers and trade union officials. Its goal was international unity and peace through sport.

Dickie recalled that during the general strike of 1926 how he use to act as a cycling courier between Uxbridge Strike Committee headquarters at the Uxbridge Labour Hall in Villiers Street and the TUC strike committee headquarters at Southall Labour Hall (where a young Sid Bidwell, later the local MP, was also active). Dickie stated that Southall was always the strongest area trade union wise because of the commitment of the railwaymen. He recalled that the Uxbridge strike committee was lead by a “fine man” called Tom Dubberley the local NUR leader.

Politically, Dickie Bond had originally joined the Uxbridge Independent Labour Party (ILP), which he recalled had about 20-30 members. The Uxbridge ILP held open air meetings at the traditional Saturday night meeting and speaking spot by the pump at the back of St Margaret’s church, Uxbridge; Dickie recalled speakers such as Fenner Brockway entertaining the crowd. A policeman would often be present at these open air meetings to take the names of speakers, and when he was asked for his name on one occasion he replied “That book must be full of my name”. There was also a small branch of the Social Democratic Federation in Uxbridge run by Albert Notley (a life assurance salesman) and a Mr Barr (a watch repairer).

Once he became unemployment, Dickie became active in the National Unemployed Workers Movement and was secretary of the Uxbridge branch; he was involved in a Hunger march from Southall Labour Hall to Hyde Park with banners stating "Work or Full maintenance". The march started with 30 or 40 mostly from Hayes and Southall but picked up groups of unemployed along the way... "We shouted to passers by join the march … joins the march and some did".

Dickie was also involved in the Uxbridge League Against Imperialism (LAI) (Reginald Bridgeman head of the national LAI was the local Labour candidate). In 1929 Dickie joined the Communist Party (after his visit that year to Moscow to participate in the Workers Olympics of 1929). Until his death, Dickie was a regular seller of the Daily Worker, and later the Morning Star, outside Uxbridge Underground station, “The Star is my Bible”, he would say.

During the Thirties, Dickie found it hard to secure long term employment as an electrician because of his political views he was regularly victimised and blacklisted " when ever they got to find out who I was I was sacked, It was the same where ever I went". He was awarded the TUC Tolpuddle medal for recruitment in 1934 (a medal which he continued to wear on his jacket lapel until his death).

One of the many who turned out to defend the East End against Mosley’s fascists at Cable Street on October 4th 1936, Dickie mobilised many of his union members to attend Cable Street. At one point, Dickie himself found himself and 20 to 30 other anti-fascists cornered by a large police presence, eventually being baton-charged and deliberately forced into a large underground lavatory where they were locked in by the policemen.

During the Spanish Civil War, Dickie helped with collections but, like a number of AEU and ETU members, volunteered to recondition and construct motor cycles (many of them motor cycle ambulances). The work, at Hayes Labour Hall in Pump Lane, was led by Sid Bennett and John Mansfield (both Fairey Aviation apprentices).

Dickie recalled the witch hunt of Communists in 1941 lead by Labour Minister Herbert Morrison at the outbreak of the Second World War:

“I was working on Government work as an electrician, in the Liverpool dock yards (Cammell Laird). One of the organisers of my union, Frank Foulkes, a member of the Communist Party member, came to me one day and said `look, Dick, I have been given instructions by the Police, that with your history, if you’re not out of Liverpool in 24 hours, you’re going to be arrested under (Regulation) 18b, for your political outlook. The only thing I can do now is take you to a certain place outside Liverpool (a little cottage that acted as a safe house), where they had all the food and everything for me, if you’re going to have a drink (he gave me money), tell them you’re one of the evacuees from London.’
I was down there about two or three weeks, I could not send a letter to my wife, or send her money, He had to do that. After some weeks, he came down in his car, `you’ve got to do some work’, he said. Russia had come into war from 22nd June 1941 and the whole political complexion changed, so I went back to work as electrician ... I would have been arrested, if it was not for Frank Foulkes.... he saved me a lot of trouble". Unsurprisingly, Dickie never ever went back to Liverpool!

One other war time recollection was working `up north’ with a young electrician’s apprentice and Young Communist League member, called Frank Chaplet, later to become the ultra right wing General Secretary of the ETU.

Just after the end of the war, Dickie secure permanent work for the next two decades as an electrician for the London County Council, based at County Hall but looking after local schools and health establishments. He became Chairman of the former London County Council Shop Steward Committee (and remained an ETU member for fifty five years).
After the war he worked with fellow Uxbridge Communist Fred Glitz and left wing Labour councillors to address the shortages of housing and in 1946 helped squatters (many were bombed out families or newly returned solders with new or reclaimed families) to occupy Coaxden Hall, Providence Road Nursery.
Dickie also stood for the Uxbridge Town council as a Communist along with Glitz.

Dickie served on the ETU National Executive Committee and was on the London District Committee, President of North West Region and Chairman of Acton, Hayes and Uxbridge ETU branches.

In the 1940s Dickie became involved with Hayes Trades Council for fifteen years before its amalgamation to form Hillingdon Trades Union Council. He was a member of the London Co-operative Society (LCS) for 22 years, and was Chairman of District 28 of the LCS; he was elected to the London Society’s West Area Education Committee. After the war, Uxbridge elected Frank Beswick as its Labour MP, a man whom Dickie thought a good local Labour MP. Dickie was active in the co-operative youth movement, the Woodcraft Folk, which met at Providence Road School, in the 60s and 70s. Dickie Bond recalled that there were quite a lot of progressive people involved in co-operative movement locally including Mrs Dubblerley (later Mayor of Uxbridge). In later years Dickie was active in the Uxbridge & District branch of the National Association of Old Age Pensioners.

Among his not so well known interests were poetry and folk music, particularly Peggy Seeger and Ewan McColl, his favourite song being “Where have all the flowers gone?” Dickie was inspired to write a Ballad which he was to hear Peggy Seeger sing. It was the Ballard of the Migrant Labourer:

“A building is more than concrete,
It’s also part of them,
Who build but seldom inhabit,
Its also part of men.
Part of the sinew and muscle, the skill of their hands and brain.
Part of their hope in the morning, gone with the evening again.”

His wife Nancy, who died in 1969, was also a keen Socialist, Women’s co-operator and Labour party member. She was a founder member of Uxbridge Labour Party, and on occasions a Labour Council candidate. Nancy was not infrequently attacked by local Tories as a Communist and some inside the Labour Party tried to have her expelled for criticising its policies.

During the Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985, Dickie was charged with two counts of making a street collection without permission of the commissioner and with using a megaphone to obtain money - Hillingdon Trades Union Council raised over £ 6,000 during the strike. Dickie appeared in court for the first time two days before his 85th birthday. He participated along with many from Hillingdon in the Kent NUM Ramsgate solidarity march for the miners. Kent NUM friends picketed West Drayton Coal depot during the dispute (being based in the offices of the Trade Union Support Unit based in West Drayton). After the strike, Dickie noted that: “The strike may be over but the struggle goes on for all of us - the class struggle goes on all the bloody time". Dickie was, from my recollection, a small, well-dressed man, always in a suit and trilby hat, and, even in his later years, possessed a strong powerful voice.

Michael Walker

Source: personal interview and Morning Star article 1985

Charles Bornat

Born in 1909, Bornat worked in Plymouth as a professional architect from around 1946 to 1950 on the reconstruction of the city after its devastating wartime bombing. Then he moved to Coventry to work in the same vein, being attracted to the city by its left-leaning Labour council’s plan for modernistic reconstruction. Bornat was long associated with managing the property of the Communist Party in Queen’s Road. A long term member of the CPGB, he died on 17th July 2000, aged 91.

Rutland Boughton

Born in 1878, Boughton, was a pupil of Stanford at the Royal College of Music in London. He first became known as a composer of orchestral and choral music. But opera was his real love and in 1914 he established the first of his Glastonbury Festivals. Boughton was something of a mentor to the much younger Alan Bush in his youth (see separate entry).

By 1926, he had mounted over 300 staged performances and 100 chamber music concerts. In 1922 his opera The Immortal Hour was produced in London where it enjoyed a phenomenal success, setting a still unbroken world record for the longest continuous run of any opera. It was followed by notable London productions of Bethlehem and Alkestis. Rutland Boughton died in 1960

Harry Bourne

Of Jewish extraction, Harry Bourne served in the International Brigade in Spain and was born in 1913. He is probably the International Brigader whose real name was documented as Harold Ceiternbaum. The home address of this volunteer was Westcliffe-on-Sea, a sea-side town near Southend in Essex, which had a significant and generally prosperous Jewish community, around 300 families by the 1930s.

The name Ceiternbaum appears to have been a corruption of a widely used name in Central and Eastern Europe, from where the family presumably originated. No less than 21 variations in spelling, mostly vowel changes, exist on Jewish family history websites but it must have originally been “Citronbaum” - or, delightfully, “lemon tree” in German. The version used to register as an IB volunteer is very unusual and descendants continuing to use the name are few. It seems likely that young Harry fell out (over politics perhaps) with a prosperous father, for the resort was a bolt hole for those who had done well in business in the east end of London.

The IB volunteer, Ceiternbaum, was also known successively as Harold Sittingbaum and then possibly Harold Sittingbourne (a place in Kent) and finally Harold Bourne … or – Harry Bourne! It seems highly that Bourne adopted a nom de guerre and that the identification is accurate, since the later Party functionary was credited with fighting on the Ebro, as did Ceiternbaum, in his election addresses in the 1960s and he would not have been in any way unusual in anglicising his name.

He was already a Communist Party member when he was in the battle of the River Ebro, where he received a wound that gave him a life-long limp. This was a decisive battle; in April 1938 Franco’s army was in danger of encircling Madrid. In an attempt to relieve the pressure on the Spanish capital, the Republicans attacked across the fast-flowing Ebro. Republican troops, including the 15th International Brigade and the British Battalion, began crossing the river in boats on 25th July. They suffered heavy casualties and after six days was forced to retreat. Some 6,500 were killed and nearly 30,000 wounded, including Harry Bourne.


Harry Bourne

This finally destroyed the Republican Army as a fighting force. In a desperate attempt to secure international action to prevent German and Italian intervention in support of Franco, on the 23rd September, the Republican government unilaterally withdrew the IB from Spain.

During the blitz in the Second World War, Harry Bourne was heavily involved in the Communist project in the East End of London to occupy London Underground stations as make-shift shelters for working class people, an initiative that eventually won official approval.

He was a clerical worker before becoming a full-time Party official, firstly in the West of England District Secretary and then, from about 1952 as the District Secretary in the Midlands. He was a Parliamentary candidate in Coventry East, polling 1,368 votes (2.26%) in 1966 and 1,138 votes (1.88%) in 1964.

A member of the Party EC, Bourne was an energetic and ebullient man, a Party leader of enormous talent who commanded loyalty and affection as well as respect. He accepted a secondment for one year to head the East Midlands District of the Party in the early 1970s, when the District was evenly split over the decision on which local full-timer to appoint as District Secretary, a conflict that owed as much to political differences of the nature that would bedevil the Party in the decade to come as to personalities.

He retired early in 1973 of ill-health and died the following year, aged only 61 years; an ambition to write creative stories being thwarted by this relatively early death. He was married to Mary, herself a life-long Communist, who died in great old age in the 1990s.

Party pamphlets by Harry Bourne: `Racialism: Cause and Cure’ (1965); `The Midlands case against the Common Market’ (With George Jelf); Midlands District Communist Party (1963)

Sources: GS personal knowledge, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org; Frank Watters "Being Frank" (1992)

Dave Bowman

Born on March 6th 1913, Dave Bowman first became involved in Communist politics in the 1930s. For most of the three decades after the Second World War, he was the focal point of the Communist Party’s considerable influence in and around Dundee. In 1945, he refused to run as the Communist parliamentary candidate for Dundee East against John Strachey out of sympathy for the man and his previous politics. This was a decision that embittered his partner in the Dundee West seat, Krishna Menon, a future foreign minister in Nehru’s government. Nonetheless, Bowman did contest the seat on seven occasions in all, unsuccessfully so, despite the strong Communist tradition in Dundee.

An engine driver, who followed in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather, he was an activist for the National Union of Railwaymen rather than ASLEF. Bowman was, like many railway workers, highly proud of his industry. He himself drove the fastest steam locomotive in the world, the Mallard, in its prime years and, during the war, he was sufficiently regarded as a loco driver to drive Winston Churchill and the Polish general, Sikorski, on a special mission to Dundee.

At the 1951 General Election, Dave Bowman stood as a Communist Party candidate for Dundee, a role he reprised several times. An article by Peter Kerrigan in December 1951 reported on the campaign:

“Naturally, where Communist candidates were standing, there arose difficulties in respect to official declarations from trade union organisations. In Dundee, where Dave Bowman stood, many leading workers signed a recommendation addressed in their individual capacity to fellow workers in the particular industry, urging them to vote for Bowman. In this way 64 transport workers, 91 railway workers (Bowman is a railwayman), 50 building workers, and 107 shipyard workers signed."

"Photostatic copies of the signatures appended to the appeal were reproduced first in separate leaflets according to the industry and distributed at the enterprises concerned, and then all together in a four-page folder issued on the eve of the poll The effect was very good."

Bowman had four three-year terms on the NUR executive from 1953 to 1974. (The union (as does its successor, today's RMT) operated a rule debarring continuous service on the EC, requiring periods of absence in between terms of office.) He eventually became NUR President between 1975 and 1977; at the time this was a highly influential position of what was then an exceedingly large union.

It is widely conceded that Bowman would have been elected President in the 1960s, were it not for his Party membership. Arising from the anti-communist bans and proscriptions of the later 1940s, the union’s rulebook stipulated that its President had to be a delegate to the Labour Party and be eligible to sit on its national executive. Clearly, as member of the Communist Party, he would be unable to fulfil this stipulation. Despite all this, Bowman was only narrowly defeated in the 1958 presidential election, so widely was he admired.

Dave Bowman

At this stage, unlike the campaigns to lift the bans on Communists in other unions, there was little interest in applying pressure for the removal of this minor and esoteric constitutional limitation. There were suspicions that this experience wore down Bowman’s otherwise staunch commitment to Communism. He took issue with the calculatedly nuanced position of the Party’s executive committee after the 1968 Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia and allowed himself to fail to be re-carded in 1970. His departure from the Communist Party was marked by considerable press attention, negatively directed at the Party. Later, he quietly joined the Labour Party and was thus a member according to rule when he was finally elected President at the last possible moment before he retired from work.

As such, he was intimately involved with the 1975 national rail pay talks. The NUR had put in a 30% pay claim in the wake of the successful outcome of NUM’s 1974 dispute that led to the fall of Heath’s government and the election of one lead by Harold Wilson. With a strike looming, Bowman and the NUR General Secretary, Sid Weighell, were called to Downing Street. Although they called the strike off, it was with their demands more or less met. As President of the NUR, he was disappointed in his hopes to overcome the skill sectionalism that had marked out the train drivers union, ASLEF, preventing three generations of Bowmans from joining it due to their political commitment to all-grades industrial unionism. Dave Bowman died on March 3rd 1996, aged 82.

Guardian date contemporary to Bowman’s death

Gerry Bradley (né Gerald Cecil Barathy)

According to the Barathy family, Gerry was born on the 25th April, 1896 at 40 Aldridge Villa, Paddington (or, technically, Bayswater in the parish of Fulham). Bradley was to later claim to have been born in 1900 and he certainly does not appear in the January 1896 to June 1898, or any 1900, registrations of births at all (the only ones checked so far), begging the question as to whether he was even registered for birth and how old he actually was. A remarkable absence of actual registered as opposed to census-taken Barathys can be discerned in the record. Perhaps this had something to do with the insecurities of being born of second generation immigrant background. It is often forgotten that the late 19th century had much of the feel of contemporary Britain in the remarkable level of central and east European immigrants moving around the country.

However, some degree of certitude that Gerald was a toddler in Britain may be relied upon as far as the 1901 census is concerned, when he was cited as being four years old. His sister, Rose Louise was seven, and older brother, Alexander, ten years old. His mother, Mary Rowley, was supposed to have been born in 1862, but she certainly told the census in 1901 that she was then 29 years of age! Born in Widford, Hertfordshire, she was described as a confectioner and tobacconist with her own shop at 340 Lillie Road, Fulham. (It was a good location, in a business sense, for Lillie Road still runs from Fulham Palace Road midway between the Earl’s Court exhibition centre and Chelsea football ground, towards South Kensington.) Her husband, Sidney de Barathy was 23 years old, so she at least openly admitted that she was six years older than her husband at 29 years but was she perhaps as old as 36?

In keeping with Gerry’s entire life of intrigue and adventure, some uncertainty has emerged as to whether his real father was a Wilfred Barathy, or Sidney Alexander de Barathy but the 1901 census has the latter as being the man of the house. This Wilfred was either a conductor of music, or professor of music, or both, and was certainly deceased by 1919, when Gerry married Mildred Curzon on April 29th 1919. The marriage certificate gives his age as 24, Mildred (known as Mary) was 29.

The Barathy connection was always important to the family for a very real sense of history is attached to the name. Gerry’s grandfather, Alexander de Barathy, the originator of the taste for Alexander as a family name, was born in around 1837 and married Kate Apthorpe (born March 1852) in Cambridge. The old man clearly was around when Gerry was little, for he died in Paddington in 1901. Alexander had three children, the first, Henry Cecil (was Gerry second-named Cecil for his uncle?), was born in 1857 in Schonberg, Moravia, who was clearly born to a different wife than Kate and he may have not been. Moravia was still relatively undeveloped at the time of Henry’s birth; the town of Mahrisch-Schonberg still only had a population of 11,636 by 1911.

The family name, normally rendered Baráthy in central Europe (indicating a long `a’) may have two origins. There is the place name, Baráty (a more phonetic spelling for the name), which may be relevant since the addition of `de’ in the French style is suggestive of a noble family owning a village and its surrounding land. As a surname, there were small concentrations in 1891 in two areas of Hungary, then a dual monarchy with Austria in the manner of Scotland and England. There was the more southern area of Bács-Bodrog, which straddles Serbia and Hungary and Komárom on the Danube in north-west Hungary, which might appear as a more likely candidate for the Anglo-Canadian branch of Barthys.

For the boundaries between Slovakish Moravia and Magyar lands constantly changed hands over the centuries and a branch of a noble family from a younger son might easily find itself dispossessed and somehow shunted into `foreign’ territory to the north in seeking new opportunities. This was especially so in the wake of the Napoleonic wars that so unsettled the rule of nobilities across the continent. Either way, all during the 19th century, substantial numbers of Hungarians lived in Moravia and consequently became citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Moravia takes its name from the Morava River which rises in the northwest of the region; it variously called Mähren (German), Morvaország (Hungarian) and Morawy (Polish). This nation has perched on a mountainous plateau that slopes from north to south for a thousand years. A territory with its own history, it is bounded on the east by Hungary, the south by Lower Austria, the west Bohemia and north by both Prussian and Austrian Silesias, with some areas touching the Sudeten ridges that became so important to Hitler in 1938. A Slavonic state which lost its political independence, the majority population of around 2.5 million in the early 20th century were indistinguishable from their Bohemian or Czech neighbours, but around a quarter 95% were Roman Catholics.

The mineral wealth of Moravia was greatly attractive to Austria-Hungary, consisting of coal, lignite, iron-ore, graphite, alum, potter's clay, roofing-slate, and silver mines. This led to industrial development, in the form of textiles, iron-foundries, the manufacture of industrial machines and earthenware products. Little wonder then that, back during the time Henry was growing up, it was made an `independent’ crown-land of Austria from 1849. This resulted in the most noticeable feature of 19th century Moravian political history being sympathy with the anti-Germanic home-rule agitation of the related Bohemian Czechs to their west. [`Die Lander OesterreichUngarns’ (Vienna, 1881-1889)] Moravia is now on the northern edge of the Czech Republic, bordering Slovakia and Poland.

When Czechoslovakia was established in 1918, the Hungarian speaking minority counted a million people, mainly inhabiting Slovakia and Sub-Carpathia along the border with Hungary. With the 1938 Munich Agreement, most of the Hungarian minority was annexed to Hungary but the outcome of the Second World War reversed the position. The consequence of a century of border movements is that Hungarians became a very small minority in what is now the Czech Republic. Czecho-Hungarians are today scattered across the country, with concentrations in Prague and the surrounding area, as well as in the Northern Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia region. According to the Czech Republic’s 2001 census, 14,672 people have declared Hungarian nationality, as against 19,932 in 1991, although the feeling is that this is more to do with a reserve about not being viewed as sufficiently Czech than it is to do with an actual decline in numbers.

To return to the story of the Barathys, who moved to Britain in the 19th century from this region, despite their Hungarian background, one Henry Charles de Barathy, a resident in Blackburn, received a certificate of naturalisation (No. 11,256) on 25th June 1924. [Home Office: Registered Papers, Supplementary HO 144/3297] Although he would have been 67 years old, it does not seem unlikely that this H C Barathy was not the H C Barathy born in Schonberg, Moravia, despite the transformation of Cecil into Charles, it is not unlikely that he simply didn’t like the name, certainly this is the only H C Barathy from this period that can be found. If the two men are one and the same, as a teenager or young man he would have perhaps come to Britain with his father, as immigrants seeking status, work and wives. As an elderly man, he would have wanted to declare his commitment to what he saw now as his native land, especially as Hungarians now found themselves in an entirely new country, Czechoslovakia – hence the late naturalisation move. It may also be conjectured that the Barathys were congenital avoiders of registration, if they could help it, and H C was marking his final territory by embracing the legalisation of citizenship.

The other two children, Kate, born in Hackney in 1879 and Sidney (Sydney) Alexander de Barathy, who was born on 6th May 1877 in South Hackney, then in Middlesex. (An Edward Curzon was born in 1889 in Cheshire.) Sidney was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and it was there that, around 1895, that Sidney married Maysie (Majorie) Vinsen (born 26th January 1877 in Cambridge) when she was 18 years old. Sidney served in the Boer War 1900-1901, in the Royal Army Medical Corps (according to the 1901 census). In 1907, he moved to Alberta, Canada and was an auctioneer, land agent and barrister there, being known as Sir Sydney. A son, also Sidney, was born on June 26th 1911 in Trocha, Alberta. As a lieutenant in the Alberta Regiment, Sidney Alexander was wounded during the First World War and appears to have de missed in the early 1920, his wife remarrying and surviving to a grand old age in the USA.

Gerald was also in the First World War and this was to be a much more significant event for him in so many different ways. The radicalisation he would have experienced in the trenches would send him in the direction of Marxism and revolutionary activity, perhaps to an extent that it strained his marriage. The UK National Archive show possession of the army medal card of Gerald Barathy, private 12203 in the Machine Gun Corps, private 11153 of the Royal West Kent Regiment. The medal card of Gerald’s brother, Alex Barathy, a private in the Royal Fusiliers (8294) and Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (43870) is also in the collection. Both cards applied during the period 1914-1920. [Catalogue reference is WO 372/1]. It is, however, pretty likely that these relate to the 1914-18 period. This was notoriously a greatly politically radicalising experience. If Gerald was born in 1896, he would have been 18 in 1914 and easily able to join up. If he was born in 1900, he would not have been able to join the army until very near its end. It may be of course that he was in the army from 1919 and, if so this would have placed him on the scene just as the most dramatic events were unfolding.

Gerry appears to have done well in the army by becoming a non-commissioned officer. A photograph of Gerry with army pals, judging by the joy of the scene perhaps on the eve of demobilisation, shows him wearing a corporal’s stripes. His military background of leadership would have received a strong welcome from Republican elements if he had offered his service. The fact that Alex, Gerry’s brother was in an Irish regiment is very interesting, especially since his nephews, Gerald’s sons, spent some time in Dublin, in about 1921/22 then returning to England.

Confirmation that Gerry was indeed involved in some way in the struggles in Ireland comes from the daughter of his third wife has said that he was active in the Irish Republican movement and also a founder member of the British Communist Party, which would have made him very likely a member of a pre-existing Marxist organisation before 1920. If he were active in Irish politics this would be by no means unusual, given the close connection between the Party and Republicans forged first in the Irish War of Independence (January 1919 to July 1921) and then the anti-Treaty side during the Irish Civil War (June 28, 1922 to May 24, 1923).

Bradley’s involvement is likely to have taken the form of being a combatant, for he would have been at least 22 and possibly 26 years old. If G C Bradley and G C Barathy are one and the same person as the family believe and he was thus born in 1896, intriguingly, it would make him around 19 or 20 years of age during the Easter Rising which, in the form of the Citizen Army brigade, contained many Marxist socialists. It is not yet known for sure what form of activity his Irish adventure took, however.

Whatever the case, a year after his marriage to Mary, their son Gerald (also Gerry) Alexander (another one!) was born in 1920. Was Gerry senior absent on revolutionary wanderings for the next period? In 1925 Mary (Mildred born 1888, died 1984) gave birth to Terry and Gerald announced that he was leaving shortly after the birth, coming back about a year later but being told to clear off! Mary went into service from 1926, her children variously looked after by Barnados and private schools; it is unclear whether a divorce was sought and granted.

Seemingly Gerald C. changed his name to Bradley, it is believed by the family, perhaps around 1929/30. Although, there is no reason to suppose that it may not have been some time before and his involvement in Irish revolutionary politics would make this highly likely. One interesting hypothesis that may be worth considering is that the correct phonetic pronunciation of Barathy is “Baraty”; such a name would certainly be rendered closely to sound something like `Bradley’ by those with strong Irish accents, especially those from Dublin. And Gerry, coupled with Bradley, was the name of more than one IRA hero in history. Moreover, Bradley is a very confused and twisted Anglicisation of an ancient Celtic warrior family of note in Irish mythology. No doubt the name suited him.

By the very late 1920s or early 1930s, Gerry Bradley was in a `married’ relationship with a `wife’ by name of Lee. In May 1933, Gerry Bradley, described as a writer living at Jubilee Place, Kings Road, Chelsea, and two other men, were charged with pouring red paint over the head and shoulders of a wax statue of Adolf Hitler, displayed in the rooms of Madam Tussaud, after which they also hung a placard saying “Hitler, the mass murderer” on a cord, dangling from his neck. After wrangling with the magistrate who tried to prevent them from making political statements of justification, the men were removed from the court forcibly and then kept in custody for a week and this was considered sufficient punishment along with a fine and payment of compensation to Tussaud’s.

Although Lee Bradley had been also involved and was initially detained, she wasn't charged. It was said that she had struggled with what she thought was a bystander but who turned out to be a conveniently handy policeman, so as to permit her husband to escape. The magistrate gave her the benefit of the doubt but the fact that she was an American diplomat’s daughter may have helped!

At the trial, a Special Branch detective sergeant from Scotland Yard said 'he knew Bradley of old' and the other two protesters both had form, having been previously arrested in 1931. Don Irving had been an organiser of the NUWM Hugh Slater had `incited’ a breach of the peace in Nottingham. Gerry Bradley’s age was given as 33, which would have had him born in 1900. The supposition may be offered that the discrepancy of four years arose around the time of a formal name change in 1929, when he is likely to have met Lee and impressed her with his panache. If he had served `only’ in the war of independence and civil war in Ireland, and had supposedly been born in 1900, he would have been between 19 and 23 when his military activity ceased and around 29 when beginning a relationship with Lee. Perhaps an age of 33 sounded less attractive? Moreover, it might beg the question as to why he had not been in the Easter Rising, when he was 20 and not a mere 16 years of age, thus being excused for not being quite the pioneer.

It seems that, some time after the 1926 General Strike, Bradley began to prise himself away from the Communist Party in the belief that it had not been sufficiently revolutionary and that the strike had been betrayed by the closeness with left socialist trade union leaders that the Party had displayed. His involvement in Irish guerrilla activity surely disposed him to a belief that insurrectionary politics were the answer to the failure of mass action.

Even so, Lee certainly emerges as by far the more radical and committed idealist and is even mentioned as a significant figure in `The History of British Trotskyism to 1949’ by Martin Upham (September 1980). Sometime in 1929 and 1930, the Marxist League was formed, as the first formal manifestation of opposition factionalism in the British revolutionary movement. A tiny revolutionary propaganda group, it stayed independent of all parties and spent its time selling literature and holding open air meetings in Hyde Park, Tottenham Court Road and elsewhere. Lee Bradley, who like her husband Gerry had been a member of the Marxist League, was a member of the Chelsea branch of the Communist Party expelled early in 1933 for Trotskyist factionalism. Some of the ML adherents joined with a tiny fragment inside the Independent Labour Party to form a short lived “Communist League” (CL); family history, perhaps based on Bradley’s own account, has him as founding this new formation but it seems his `wife’ was more of a key player.

The reality is that a debate was now under way all during 1933 about how Trotsky’s supporters could organize, whether in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) or outside it and this was only `resolved’ by the end of the year after major debate by the outcome of a complete disarray between ultra-leftist factions. Of course, this reality continued well into modern times, as Trotskyists wrestled with the problem of entryism posed against the reality that the foundation of an independent party was rather more difficult.

Trotsky’s proposal for his small band of British supporters to enter the ILP was matched by a range of alternatives. There was the idea of a “split perspective” of working within the ILP, in anticipation of a break, by making themselves an organised fraction. Yet there were those who also insisted on independence from the ILP, but the maintenance of an independent ultra-revolutionary Communist current in some way. A man who became famous as a pioneer of British Trotskyism, Harry Wicks, rather unrealistically, led the idea of the infinitesimally small CL being transformed into an independent organised fraction which could then openly join the ILP. Wicks had been behind the very first small “Balham” group of Communists who began to reject the position of their party and coalesced around support for Trotsky’s position.

Various combinations of these tactical organizational approaches were before the several score of nascent Trotskyists in Britain but belief in the continued existence of the Communist League was not well based. But Wicks’ proposal was backed by the Battersea and Chelsea groups of the Communist League and received sterling support from Lee Bradley in particular. Naturally, this support was important to Wicks and he speaks highly of the husband and wife team in his autobiography: “Both were experienced speakers in Hyde Park. Lee was outstandingly intelligent; her husband, Gerry, had done a short stretch in jail for involvement in a confrontation between unemployed and the police. They and our other Chelsea comrades eventually got hold of a small press and actually printed four issues of `Red Flag’ – hand setting the type, a most laborious task.” Harry Wicks “Keeping my head” Logie Barrow/Socialist Platform (1992) p168]
Wicks and the Bradleys insisted that entry into the ILP wouldn’t work well without an organized fraction but did not think that the ILP could be won for Trotskyism. Expelled Communist Party members such as the Bradleys had taken a far larger step than had the ILP members now in the CL, because they had split with their party and this single fact undermined any possibility of a united position.

Of the 37 delegates at the 17th December 1933 `unity’ conference, the Battersea-Chelsea position had only 10 supporters, most then moved behind the majority that sought to establish a new Trotskyist formation. This floundered, like all other attempts, until the new environment of the 1960s rejuvenated ultra-left politics. The remainder of the minority now declared they were going to join the ILP, so both Wicks and Lee Bradley were put on the new National Committee in place of their representatives. Most of those who had not been in the Communist Party remained in, or returned to, the ILP. The ex-communists opted for an open organization and Trotskyism was born. In this sense, Wicks and to a lesser extent, the Bradleys are accepted by most students of Trotskyism as it founders. Lee Bradley was certainly still a major force in British Trotskyism up to 1939, when she appears to have returned to the USA.

Lee and Gerry had one daughter Anne, and the mother and daughter later returned to America. An Anne Lee later surfaced in British Trotskyist politics, though a relationship is unknown and it is likely that the name was a pseudonym, although it may have been in homage. Gerry then 'married' Beryl and they had two children, the daughter of which survived until recent times and has supplied information. So far, it is unclear when Anne was born but it is likely to have been in London. Ultimately the answer is to search birth records. But it must have been after May 1933 for, had Lee had a child (or been pregnant), it would have been too tempting for the magistrate not to have resorted to this as an excuse not to charge her over the Tussaud’s incident. A reasonable guess is that Ann was already born by 1939 – for reasons which we shall come to.

But Gerry Bradley’s role in revolutionary history does not quite disappear yet at all by any means. It may be reasonably speculated that his insurrectionary past and disappointment with the calamity of the outcome of the 1926 strike, in which the British Communist Party was to the fore in leading united working struggle, by building Councils of Action, but did not seek repudiation of weaker elements at a local level lay the basis for a hostility to the Party that he was a member of. His background made it difficult for him to accept the moderate implementation, and then rapid shift away, from independent revolutionary perspectives and towards left unity, and even broader popular front politics, that was evident in the British Communist Party’s handling of the Communist International’s left turn from 1929. Whilst it is also likely that the personal fractiousness of his political character simply made it difficult for him to submit to Party discipline.

The sharp character of the international financial crisis of 1929 had seen the Party active in the mobilization of masses of unemployed; many stunts, such as the taking over of posh restaurants by the unemployed, were employed and Wicks’ account seems to suggest Gerry Bradley was heavily involved in this. The evident panache and dash that may be surmised as being his particular personal style would not have fit well into the developments inside the Communist Party that were already evident and led to the mass mobilization of communities against fascism so well exemplified by the `battle of Cable Street’. Individual acts of heroism, especially where touched by personal violence, such as small gangs street fighting Fascists, which had been so much a feature of late 1920s German politics, were not to the taste of the British Party. A sense of Gerry Bradley’s persona emerges in one account by the veteran Trotskyist, CLR James that would appear to validate this speculation about his earlier political journey.

C L R James recalled that, in 1936, he was involved in public debates over the Moscow treason trials; he made it a practice to go to Communist public meetings and take a couple of people with him to “wreck” the event. At one such meeting, there were a number of celebrities on the platform, such as Kingsley Martin and others. It is difficult in contemporary times to recall how unpopular criticism of the USSR was at the time. James, nonetheless, challenged the platform from the hall and then stood up.

He recalls: “There was a man called Gerry Bradley, Gerry was a great fighter, irrespective of the number of policemen. Gerry was my good friend, he said to me, "James, there will be the two of us ...." and we went into the meeting together. He stood up and said, "Mr Chairman, Comrade James here has been standing up for the past half hour and wants to be able to say a few words....". The Communist Party did not want to give me the democracy, but they were afraid that Gerry would break up their meeting. Then Gerry turned to me and said, "Mr James, come with me" and led me up to the platform. The audience listened, and I put the case for Trotskyism, and it wrecked their meeting.” [CLR James and British Trotskyism, an interview given by CLR James to Al Richardson, Clarence Chrysostom and Anna Grimshaw; 8th June and 16th November 1986 in South London. Socialist Platform]

Back to Lee then; we can’t now at this distance in time, unless witnesses or documents surface, tell in what circumstances and exactly when Lee returned to America with her daughter Anne. But we can speculate that, whatever the state of the relationship by this stage between Gerry and Lee, about her departure. The key to understanding here is that Trotskyists (for contorted reasons to do with opposition to the USSR, which need not detain us) were opposed to the coming conflict that we know as the Second World War. The US was initially largely determined to keep out of it. Lee would not have renounced her US citizenship, which was so valuable an asset then as now, but, had she formally actually married Gerry, would have acquired dual nationality. I suspect no formal marriage occurred but, again, only a time-consuming and detailed check of the records, which is very time-consuming, would reveal it.

So … opposing the war but also being a neutral citizen has dangers. It might very well attract questions that make a neutral uncomfortable, especially speaking `English’ naturally. The public mood would be to be suspicious (recalling the murderous bombardments in Spain) and there were real fears that the blitz would be much worse than it actually was and many British children would be evacuated, even as far as Canada. Lee’s `connections’ would make it easy for her to leave and why should she stay in discomfort only to be treated as a virtual enemy? Everything changed after 1941, so a pretty good guess would be that Lee left anywhere between 1939 and 1941, with an emphasis on the earlier stages.

Trotskyists were viewed (probably unfairly in retrospect, especially as Communists earlier had had their own `fair' share of such accusations from 1939-1941) as being potentially tactical allies of Hitler after 1941 because of their anti-Sovietism and support for strikes in wartime, at least objectively so. Plus, even though the US became a valued ally after 1941, Americans themselves weren’t too well-liked (except by young women and little kids!) an American Trotskyist would be disliked by Americans and Brits alike!!! It seems reasonable to guess that Lee departed as soon as war between UK and Germany was declared.

Having been a member of the Communist Party from 1920 to 1933 and then heavily involved in Trotskyist politics for much of the 1930s, the general trail on Gerry Bradley currently goes cold. We don’t know quite what kind of war he had. But his third `marriage’ to Beryl, who came after Lee, presumably sometime during the war years seems to have brought some stability. The 20 year difference between Gerry and Beryl, who was born around 1923, is still alive and lives in Cornwall, is most evident from a late 1940s group photo in which the older man proudly and happily shows off his lover.

Sometime after the war, he appears to have found enough capital to become the proprietor of a small hotel in Cornwall; it was a role that seemed to suit his larger than life persona. A photograph of Gerry as `mine host’, dispensing drinks, once existed but has disappeared. It seem that his third partner only ever had a total of three photographs of Gerry, seemingly he didn’t like having his photo taken at all, perhaps a relic of more adventurous days?

Beryl’s and Gerry’s children were born between 1954 and 1960, when the couple appear to have `married’. However, there is every reason to suppose that this time round, even if he was something of a late developer, Gerry turned out in the end to make not so bad a job of his third attempt at being the father of a family. Perhaps he had simply matured, or aged more likely; maybe Beryl had the knack of allowing his adventurism to dissipate in a more positive way. His final brood all turned out to become very successful in their various chosen fields. Although Gerry died in 1961/2, aged 61 years old, no great age even in those days, at the Greenbank hospital, and his address was given as Coombe Mill, Camerford Street, St Breward, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall.

The only pub in St Breward today is the “Old Inn & Restaurant”, Cornwall’s highest Inn, and it does not list Gerry as a previous landlord, so maybe he merely lived in the village and `hosted’ elsewhere? In any case, by then his occupation was given as a retired publican, so he had either sold the pub, or had assigned others to look after it, perhaps due to ill-health? After Beryl was left to bring up the children, although she had an asset in the form of the pub, and both children were able to go to university. From Hungary, via Moravia, England and Ireland, the wild rover had finally found his resting place on the haunting, wild and rugged territory of Bodmin Moor.

In ancient times the area was fairly densely populated; in the modern era if it were not for the occasional anorak-ed summer tourist there would be few people to come across. It can be a lonely but very beautiful landscape. Surely the dramatic granite peaks and many prehistoric stone barrows that scatter across Bodmin would have been symbolic to the aging Gerry of how he had never run away from the storm but welcomed it, raging against the hurricanes of life, even if it meant being in relatively solitary defiance. There is romance aplenty, with its wild ponies and rumours of strange wilds beasts, and Bodmin Moor is an officially designated `area of outstanding natural beauty.

On the moor are many small natural bodies of water, including the pool where legend has it that the Arthurian Excalibur was thrown to The Lady of the Lake. Gerry had been a fantastically courageous man, with charisma aplenty – even if his appetite for adventure rather overshadowed his ability to grit his teeth and deal with the mundane challenges of life. Reinventing himself and his relationships always seemed easier than finding new courses for himself and others. His attraction to factionalism in politics, his bent towards being argumentative, disputatious, and the elevation of minor tactical questions to irrelevantly strategic matters, mirrored his restlessness in domestic life.

Was it no accident that, by the 1950s, he appeared to have permitted his colourful past to tint the patina of his personality rather than interfere with the comfort of his daily existence? As Trotskyism gave way to the swapping of saloon bar tales, Gerry appears as a more rounded person, his humanity more dimensional than had been the case. Although we will never know both sides of the story, as the partner of Mary, it seems that he had been a failure to her and her children; he was simply still too immature in outlook to cope with a mature woman, perhaps in his mind more his mother than his lover.

Lee had been dazzling, her sheer force of personality being simply too seductive to resist, so that he sought to be the man she wanted – a combination of James Connolly and Lenin but, alas, his character – or his times – meant that he simply wasn’t up to it. Beryl’s more down to earth outlook, made wildly attractive by her youth and beauty was the making of him in the end. Gerry was one of history’s outrageous characters; to enable him to slip into the comfort zone before blazing log fires he needed, outside his window, the backcloth of drama at least. Where else would such a rogue find his final resting place?

Sources: Information supplied by June Barathy (Australia), including cuttings 15th and 21st May 1933; secondary sources, cited in text: CLR James, Martin Upshaw, Harry Wicks autobiography.

Lawrence Bradshaw

A socialist from his youth, the artist and sculptor, Lawrence Bradshaw joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s and was politically active throughout his life. Bradshaw began his artistic career in the early 1920s as assistant to Frank Brangwyn, the humanist polymath who had himself been an assistant to William Morris. The ideals Morris had propounded fed the outlooks of the Art Workers Guild which Bradshaw later joined.
Much of his work in the inter-war years consisted of commissioned designs for sculptural decoration of public buildings such as Watford town hall (1933-4) and the Radcliffe maternity home in Oxford (1935). He was also very active as a Marxist cultural worker, organising and designing for campaigns such as Arms for Spain and celebrations of the anniversary of the Soviet revolution. Sadly, few works or records remain as his studio was bombed during World War II. The outstanding example of Bradshaw’s work is the Marx Monument in Highgate cemetery.
In 1955, the Communist Party set up the Marx Memorial fund. Laurence Bradshaw (1899-1979) was the man who won the commission to sculpt the famous brooding monument at Karl Marx’s graveside. Bradshaw viewed the commission as a tremendous honour. He designed the entire monument from plinth to the choice of texts and their calligraphy. There were practical as well as aesthetic considerations. The original family headstone had to be incorporated, the hilly site allocated was uneven and the tomb had to be protected from possible attacks. To withstand these, Bradshaw used military engineering construction methods.
Bradshaw wrote that the first problem to be grappled with was to produce "not a monument to a man only but to a great mind and a great philosopher." Convinced that Marx "would prefer the simplest type of monument" and that "he would prefer to be on the Earth and not in the sky," Bradshaw set the powerful head and shoulders on a body which is not described but expressed. Designing a plinth of "a shape and width that would give the same effect as Marx himself would have done if he was silhouetted against the sky," Bradshaw set it level with the path to convey that Marx was among us and "not towering over the people."
Although he referred to photographs when modelling the head, here too, Bradshaw aimed to go beyond description of Marx's physiognomy, explaining that he wanted to "express the dynamic force of his intellect and the breadth and vision and power of his personality, along with a feeling of energy and endurance and dedication to purpose." Yet these are expressed in an accessible, realist manner rather than with modernist figuration's expressionist or surrealist distortions. The geometric shape and plain surfaces of the polished granite plinth and the simple lettering used for the texts are modernist, so that the contrast between these and the expressive but realist bronze head was an inspired solution to an aesthetic and ideological dilemma. This monument was made with conviction by a Marxist and it shows.
Like other figurative artists whose works remained clearly legible, Bradshaw's career suffered in the 1950s. His public commitment to Marxism may well have also been detrimental, although this is difficult to establish, since the change in taste towards abstraction led to fewer commissions for all architectural sculpture. Yet this move towards abstraction was itself partly the result of the cultural cold war. What is certain is that, when the competition for the sculptural decoration of the Time-Life building in Bond Street was announced, Bradshaw, despite decades of experience in this field, was quietly advised not to enter.
Among Bradshaw's other works were fine busts of leading communists and progressives, including the Scottish poet Hugh McDiarmid, the African-American scholar and activist Dr W E B du Bois and the Trinidadian musician and actor Edric Connor. His vivacious bust of Harry Pollitt appears to have disappeared.
In the post-war period, Bradshaw worked on colourful, impassioned paintings praising peace and internationalism and condemning injustice and war. He was active in campaigns to release the Mexican Communist David Siqueiros and to revoke the US denial of passports to Paul Robeson and Du Bois. Chairman of the British Soviet Friendship Society for many years, he designed many lively covers for its magazine.
Characteristically, his best-known work, the Marx memorial, remains unsigned. Bradshaw did not seek to carve out a name for himself within the ego-dominated art world, but unassumingly used his creativity and energy to further the cause of socialism as an artist and political activist. His was a life well lived.
Christine Lindey - Morning Star 3rd April 2007

Dr Colin Charles Bradsworth

Bradsworth was a member of the once famous Clarion Cycling Club, which also hosted Clarion Vocal Unions, as well as a range of other additional activities. The CCC was formed after six young men met at the Labour Church in Constitution Hill, Birmingham in February 1894. Here they discussed how they might combine the pleasures of cycling with the propaganda of Socialism. They formed the Socialists' Cycling Club, a name which at the second meeting was changed to the Clarion Cycling Club, after their favourite weekly paper. The Clarion tag came from Robert Blatchford's socialist paper.

The Midlands CCC opened its first clubhouse in 1915 at Lyndon End, Yardley, Birmingham, with a dinner to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the founding of the first club. It is not clear at the point of writing that Bradsworth was a local man, or was even involved in this particular venture. But one Colin Charles Bradsworth appears, according to the service record of King Edward’s school in Birmingham listing the record of old boys, to have served in the military during the First World War; if so, it is likely that this marked him our for life as an advocate of peace. CCC moved its clubhouse to Wagon Lane, Sheldon, Birmingham in 1920, which was large enough to house dances, as well as containing sleeping accommodation, but it closed sometime in the early 1930s.

The decline of the Clarion movement after 1914 may have been a result of the massive social changes that arose in the post-war period but Blatchford's support for British militarism must also have played a large part. The Communist-inspired British Workers Sports Federation rather overshadowed the Clarion movement, which began to fade in the 1930s. Although, as mostly apolitical racing cycling clubs, some are still around today. The Vocal Unions also remained popular into the 1930s but almost all of them collapsed, especially after the Clarion itself ceased publication finally in 1934. But Bradworth, a Communist Party member from the early days, would indirectly resurrect the name Clarion so that it still resonates in Birmingham by a circuitous route.

Bradsworth served for two years on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. As "Doc" Bradsworth, he was part of the medical team for the Canadian section of the International Brigades, the MacKenzie-Papineau battalion, during the Spanish Civil War. On his return to Britain, he was the founder of a Birmingham branch of the Socialist Medical Association, which was one of the most active in the country.

Then, late in 1939, Bradsworth announced that he wanted to start a workers’ choir at a Daily Worker social dance at Bristol Street Schools. A large number of Communist Party members took him up on the offer and, in time the choir was named Clarion, in honour of Bradworth and his earlier associations; the rest is, as they say, history! (See Elsie Marshall entry for more on Clarion.)

Sources: Dennis Pye Fellowship is Life – the national Clarion Cycling Club 1895-1995; Clarion Singers: http://www.clarionsingers.org.uk/home.html

Ted Bramley

Ted Bramley’s father had been an SDF supporter as a young man and was present in Trafalgar Square at the infamous Bloody Sunday demonstration in 1886. His mother was involved in the women's suffrage movement, a friend of Sylvia Pankhurst, and was involved in the Amsterdam anti-war congress.

Ted was born in Tufton Street, Westminster in 1905 and left school at the age of 14. His family were active Labour supporters who lived in Horse Shoe Alley, off Buckingham Gate. They all moved to North America when Ted was young, living in Detroit (where his father was an IWW supporter) and Ontario but returned during the First World War.

Ted worked as an engineer from 1919-1926, as a result of which he joined the AEU, which he stayed a member of until after 1947. He was a Labour Party member in the Abbey constituency in Westminster. However, his uncle, George Atkins, took him down a pit and this experience influenced Bramley to join the Communist Party in 1927, he remained a life-long Communist. He was recruited by one of the half dozen or so Labour-Communists active in the disaffiliated Westminster constituency Labour Party.

Ted Bramley was unemployed for a time after the General Strike but then worked mainly as a chauffeur for some years after 1927. By the early 1930s, he was involved in the Hammersmith branch of the Party. The NUWM had a strong presence in Shepherd's Bush, leading to Bramley contesting North Hammersmith, where he got 640 votes. He was employed for a period by the warden of a YWCA hostel who knew he was a communist and even gave him time off to contest the 1931 general election.

Bramley joined the London District Committee in 1932 (and the national PC, too). He attended the 13th plenum of the Executive Committee meeting of the Comintern held in Moscow in 1933. Bramley contested the West Ham ward from 1935 until the war years and was parliamentary candidate in 1935 for Silvertown. He stood in Ordnance ward, where he polled 550; the Labour candidate had about a thousand votes but was to spend six months in Primley Sanatorium with TB. Although volunteering to go to Spain, Pollitt refused his release due to this,

Bramley was London District Secretary from 1937, when he took over from Dave Springhall who went to Spain. As the leader of the London Communist Party, Bramley was on the list of 2,000 people to be first dealt with first when Nazi Germany invaded Britain, something he was very proud of! During the war he was rejected for military service because of his TB and employed as an engineer until 1942, when he returned to full-time party work.

He was charged with incitement to breach the peace in 1946 and bound over for 2 years in connection with the squatters' movement. He was an elected London County Councillor in 1945-1946 and 1948-1949 for the Stepney area. (See account under entry for Joyce Alergant.)

Bramley resigned as London Secretary in 1947 due to ill health, although he followed Phil Piratin as Communist prospective parliamentary candidate for what became the Stepney constituency, contesting this seat in 1951. After leaving full time work, he became a farmer in the mid 1950s in Hertfordshire and wrote for both the Daily Worker and the Morning Star on agricultural questions. He continued to work in farming until the 1970s, dying in February 1989, aged 84.

Morning Star 28th February 1989

Clive Branson

Branson was born in 1907. At the age of 23 he exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy. He joined the ILP around 1927 and the Communist Party in 1932. A member of British Battalion of International Brigade, he spent eight months in fascist concentration camp.

Organised IB convoy on his return at the end of 1938, collecting over £5,000 that was used to send food and medical supplies to Spain

Painted Battersea street scene during the blitz, exhibiting for Artists International Association

Conscripted into the Royal Armoured Corps in 1941 and sent to India in 1942. Branson was killed in action on the Arakan Front during the fighting for the Ngankedenk Pass on February 25th 1944.

Details extracted from a variety of sources

Noreen Branson

Born on May 16th 1910, the daughter of the Earl of Sligo, she was a skilful singer and joined the Bach choir in 1929. In early 1931, she took part in an East End charity concert, where she met Clive Branson, a painter and poet. They agreed to marry within only a few days and their life together centred on politics. Significantly, their artist daughter was called Rosa.

Initially members of the ILP, they later joined the Communist Party and Noreen the Co-operative Women’s Guild. They lived in the poorer parts of Chelsea and Battersea

Late in 1934, Harry Pollitt asked her to take money and documents to the then illegal Communist Party of India in Bombay. Her social background was perfect cover. During one hunt for a Comintern messenger, she was dancing with the chief of police during a new year’s ball.

She attended the 7th world congress of the Comintern in Moscow and spent several months engaged in the high risk task as a courier to underground parties in Europe.

Clive Branson went to Spain, as a volunteer for the International Brigade, where he was captured and spent eight months as a prisoner. In January 1938, whilst her husband was held in a fascist camp, Noreen began to work as a researcher for Pollitt. She then very quickly moved over to the Labour Research Department. Having been named in the deeds of Marx House as its purchaser, she was also deeply involved in its establishment and was its Vice-President up to her death.

From 1938, she worked with LRD for the next 65 years! (She was editor of `Social Service News’ from 1941.) She became the editor of its journal, `Labour Research’, for 28 years from 1944 to 1972 and continued to be associated with the group for the rest of her life. (Social Service News, which she continued to be editor of simultaneously with Labour Research, merged with the latter in 1950.)

During the Second World War, her husband, Clive, was killed in Burma in 1944 and, the next year, she published his letters as “A British Soldier in India”.

She was Secretary of St Pancras Trades Council for a while from 1947, and was a delegate from the clerical and administrative workers’ union.


The younger Noreen Branson

A member of the Communist Historians Group, Branson was a serious and published author. She was writer of a book on the struggles in Poplar, in East London, from 1919-25 and on `Britain in the Nineteen Thirties’, the latter with Margot Heinemann and two volumes of the history of the CPGB covering 1927 to 1951

As an LRD specialist, she concentrated on issues relating to social services. Her first personally written book, “Room at the Bottom” (1960) was a critique of the welfare state, but was published under the name of Katherine Hood. She also co-authored a book with Roger Simon, under the same name (he was James Harvey!). Noreen Branson died aged 93 on 25th October 2003 “still convinced of the need for a socialist transformation of society”. [Quote from Lionel Fulton in the Morning Star.]

Noreen Branson

Socialist History Society leaflet, Labour Research December 2003, Guardian (undated) October/November 2003, Morning Star 8th November 2003

Frank Bright

Frank Bright was born on 20th February 1891 in Bideford, North Devon; his father was a blacksmith, one Charles Bright of Llandaff House, Clovelly Road, Bideford. In his younger days in Bideford, Bright was a renowned rower on the local river and a good sportsman in general. A member of the Church Lads Brigade, he rowed for Bideford Amateur Athletic Club, known as the `Blues”.

Bright went to Ynyshire in South Wales in 1911 to work in the Standard Pit. A member of the South Wales Miners’ Federation for 16 years, he became an active member of the Miners Unofficial Reform Movement and later a leading light of the Rhondda Communist Party.

During the run up to the General Strike, he stated that "far more important than the fight for wages is the struggle for power"; he was imprisoned during the course of that momentous year, one of several periods of imprisonment arising from his political activities.

He became Manchester District Organiser for the Communist Party in January 1927 and, in August 1930, went to the Lenin School in Moscow, becoming well known as a "diligent exponent of Marxism" and a good platform speaker; the Bideford Gazette was later to note that he had “remarkable ability as an orator”. He spent two and a half years as a deputy to the Moscow Soviet.

According to Harold Goodwin, a Communist merchant navy sailor who worked out of Liverpool, Frank Bright had told him how he had used his mining knowledge to help the Soviet authorities combat widespread sabotage in their mines during the 1930s, when he was involved with the Communist International.

In 1935, he became Liverpool Communist Party Organiser and, in 1939, the Lancashire District Organiser, working with two other full-time organisers; Mick Jenkins (who had been active in the National Union of Tailor and Garment Workers) and Bill Whittaker (an activist in the Colne Twisters & Drawers Association) and Sam Blackwell (Manchester AEU).

Bright had worked up a good reputation amongst the cotton workers in Lancashire. But he suffered from poor health caused by pneumoconiosis and returned to Bideford and, from 1942-1943, was the Party’s Organiser for Devon and Cornwall. In 1942 he was concerned and alert enough to highlight the hostility conveyed during local WEA evening classes to the Soviet Union.

Bideford had a “lively” Communist Party branch and was able to garner enough support for Bright to address an open-air meeting towards the end of his life on Bideford Quay, on behalf of the appeal for the British Hospital in Stalingrad. But “a chair had to be borrowed from a shop, he was so weak he could not stand”. Bright was to die relatively young only the following year, suffering a “long and painful death” on 15th November 1944, leaving a wife, Ivy. The funeral took place in Plymouth, the oration being carried out by a member of the Communist Party’s EC. A memorial service in Manchester was later taken by Harry Pollitt.

Sources: Bideford Gazette 28th November 1944, Cllr Fred Bailey, in “Broadside”, journal of N Devon Communist Party No10 May 1984, courtesy of Gerald Sables,

Michael Walker

Bill Brooks

Born in Bristol on May 21st 1911, Brooks was apprenticed at the Mount Stewart dry dock. He joined the Labour Party at the age of 15, but gravitated to the Young Communist League by the time he was 19, building up the Avonmouth branch to be one of the largest on the country.

Called up to the forces in 1940, he started a unit magazine, `Rapid Fire’, which became the battalion journal. Subsequently, the battalion was disbanded, on War Office orders; the soldiers were dispersed far and wide, despite the opposition of its commander. Although his records were marked “not to be given any promotion”, Bill ended up a senior NCO in the Royal Signals. On the troopship that took him to India in 1944, he organised lectures on current affairs. This culminated in a mock election in which he, as a Communist candidate, topped the poll!

On demobilisation, he became the General Secretary of the YCL. Rather boldly, he ran as a Communist candidate against Winston Churchill in the staunchly Tory seat of Woodford in the 1950 general election, polling a mere 827 votes to Churchill’s 37,000.

In the 1950s, he was Communist Party District Organiser in the Durham coalfield and, in 1958, the Daily Worker’s circulation manager. He was later the Morning Star’s part-time City correspondent and then Motoring correspondent, although he was not a supporter of the Management Committee of the PPPS in its struggle with the revisionist-led EC of the former CPGB. Bill Brooks died aged 87 on June 10th 1998.

Guardian July 8th 1998

Ern Brooks

Brooks was born in 1911 in Manchester, the son of a spinner. He became a printer’s apprentice, who later studied at Manchester Art School, where one of his fellow pupils was L S Lowry. Brooks was a landscape painter, of the modernist school, who exhibited regularly in galleries in London and Manchester in the 1940s and 1950s.

He was married in the 1903s to Barbara Niven, for some 20 years the organiser of the PPPS Fighting Fund until she died in 1972. She was herself a painter and both were members of the Manchester Society of Modern Painters and the CPGB. They were also involved in the Manchester Theatre Union, launched by Joan Littlewood and Ewan McColl. Brooks designed backcloths for Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in London.

Both lived for a time with their friend, the poet, Hugh McDiarmid in the Outer Hebrides immediately before the war. After the war, they moved to London where Niven began work for the Daily Worker.

In 1949 Brooks was an official artist, recording the reconstruction of post-war Yugoslavia. He was commissioned to paint morals, including one for the Festival of Britain. He earned a living as a free-lance graphic designer. Although his linocuts were freely used by the Daily Worker as fund raising objects! He was a member of the exhibitions’ committee of the Artists International Association. He and Niven were close friends of John Berger. Brooks died in Halifax in 1993.

Morning Star 12th December 2000

Mary Brooksbank

Mary Brooksbank (nee Soutar) was born in Shiprow, Aberdeen, Scotland on 15th December 1897, in what Mary recalled was “one of the worst slums in the city”. Mary was one of ten children of Sandy and Rosie Soutar. Her father was from St Vigeans, Abroath, near Dundee, and had been an active trade unionist amongst the dock workers, working with James Connolly (Sandy Soutar died in 1953, aged 86), while her mother Rosie Brown was a “Fisher lassie” and domestic servant. It was said that the Soutar family was effectively “blacklisted” in Dundee because of their trade union activities.

As well as being born into a slum, Mary was born blind but recovered her eye sight at 14 months. Aged 8, she and the family moved by boat from Aberdeen to Dundee; to Pump Close, in the Overgate to be precise. Mary’s mother secured her daughter work just prior to her 14th birthday and the day after the sinking of the Titanic (April 16, 1912), as a “shifter of bobbins” at the Baltic Jute Mill, working 12 hour shifts, 6am to 6pm, for 7s/6d a week. She, therefore, witnessed the plight of the Dundee Jute workers first hand.

The life of the Dundee jute worker at the turn of the century was very hard, with long hours and dangerous working conditions. At Lochee, Cox’s jute mill employed 5,000 on 1,000 looms. Irish immigrant workers who sought work in the mill, lived in a close environment, squeezed into tenements managed by the mill owners. Unsurprisingly infant and maternal deaths were the highest in the country. Dundee was known as a “women’s town” as so many women were employed in the jute factories in preference to men, primarily it was said because of their aptitude but undoubtedly mainly because women’s wages were less. Any young men employed were laid off on reaching their 18th birthdays to prevent them earning higher wages.

Despite her diminutive stature and alleged deafness, Mary’s experience in the jute factories gave her a lifelong drive to improve the working conditions of her community, and she did this through her Communist convictions, her poetry and songs. She was an “active spokesperson for the working class in general and the jute mill workers in particular”.

Mary seems to have become a socialist during World War One and was arrested on several occasions (presumably for anti-war activities) and eventually sentenced for “breach of the peace” on Armistice Day to Perth jail in 1919 After her release, she founded the Working Women Guild to fight for better health and social services in Dundee, securing a membership of over 300. She also became active in the Women’s Railway Guild (the women’s section of the main railway workers union).

In early 1923 Cox’s Jute Mill, not only the largest but also one of the most profitable jute factories in Dundee, saw the introduction of new spinning frames requiring less staff (two instead of three). The factory was owned by Mr J. Ernest Cox, who was also a leader of the employers’ organisation, the Associated Companies of Jute Industries. A campaign against the introduction of the new machines was lead by the militant Dundee Jute & Flax Workers Union. This was established in 1906 by workers dissatisfied with the male-dominated main textile workers union; in the new union, half of the Executive Committee had to be women. The response to the union’s campaign from the employers was swift and within days 30,000 Dundee jute workers were locked out and reliant on parish relief.

The plight of the jute workers, coupled with the unemployed, lead to a 50,000 strong demonstration in Albert Square, Dundee. It was what Bob Stewart called the “largest and noisiest and possibly the most successful” demonstration ever seen in Dundee. A ten-strong delegation was elected to meet the Parish Council to discuss unemployment relief. Those elected included, Baillie Tom Stewart, Councillor John Ogilvie, Alf Maloney (AEU), McGuire and Bob Stewart. The 1923 Dundee Jute workers lock out lasted eight weeks, when, finally, the Minister of Labour, Montagu Barlow, intervened and set up an inquiry under the chairmanship of Sir David Shackleton. While the inquiry inevitably backed the owners, it did increase pay in the industry.

Mary moved to Glasgow to try her hand as a domestic servant in the West End and it was while living in the city that she meet and married Ernest Brooksbank, a skilled tailor. They married on 3rd October 1924 and moved back to Dundee. With Sandy’s tailoring skills they lived comparatively comfortably for a working class couple in Dundee. (Ernest would later die relatively young on 12th October 1943, aged 52.)

Ever active, in 1927 Mary was imprisoned again for heckling. In late 1931, a welcome home march of several hundred for Bob Stewart led to six, including Bob, being arrested, The working class of Dundee, incensed by his treatment, fought back for over a week, culminating on the 25th September 1931 with a huge demonstration being brutally baton charged by the police on horse back. Mary gave evidence in court on the `riot’ and was asked as she did so, by Sheriff Malcolm, to sit along side him because he had heard she suffered from deafness. Typically, she is alleged by Frank McCusker to have replied: “That’ll be the last thing on earth I would do, sit wi’ you.”

Along with the large band of dedicated Communists in Dundee, Mary was heavily involved, in October 1934, with the National Unemployed Workers Movement county march to Forfar, to lobby the County Council; contingents were raised from Dundee, Blairgowrie, Montrose, Ferryden, Arbroath. The period was full of such liveliness, locally. At a Dundee NUWM demonstration in February 1935, five men and one woman were arrested, (Bob?) Stewart, McCaffrey, Edward Mathers, George Stalker (NUWM organiser, NE Scotland) and his wife Mrs Stalker. Whilst in March 1935, a 25,000 strong demonstration from Dundee waved off a Hunger March which had marched from Aberdeen, Fraserburgh, Peterhead on route to Glasgow under the slogan “down with the slave act”.

As well as Mary, other key Communists involved in the campaign against unemployment in Dundee included Frank McCusker (later an International Brigadier), Johnny Rourke, James Littlejohn (leader of the Dundee NUWM contingent) Jimmy Weir, Jimmy Hodgson, Duncan Butchart and Tom Clarke; the latter, like Mary, worked in the jute mills.

Mary made up “wee rhymes” from her earliest days at work and secured a reputation for creating songs and poetry about the plight of her class and her City, the most famous being the Jute Mill Song, probably written around 1920:

“Oh, dear me, the mill is running fast
And we, poor shifters, canna get no rest.
Shifting bobbins, coarse and fine,
They fairly make you work for your ten and nine.

Oh, dear me, I wish the day were done;
Runnin' up and down the pass is no fun,
Shiftin', piecin', spinnin', warp, weft and twine,
To feed and clothe my babies off of ten and nine.

Oh, dear me, the world is ill-divided;
Them that works the hardest are the least provided.
But I must bide contented, dark days or fine;
There's no' much pleasure livin' off o' ten and nine”

Mary Brooksbank was recorded in an interview with Hamish Henderson in 1968; she stated: “And then inside work, they used to sing the Jute Mill song you know and when I grew up I put the words, the verses to it that wis… Oh, dear me – they used to go aroond 'the mill's gaen fest, the puir wee shifters canna get a rest.’
Hamish Henderson: And how much of that was what they were singing in the mill and how much did you add to it?
Mary Brooksbank: Only the ditty, 'Oh dear me, the mill's gaen fest, the puir wee shifters…'. The verses are all mine. And that verse, 'to feed and cled my bairnie' was brought to me by a lassie who was worried. It wis hard lines if she…ye hid an illegitimate child and you had to pay for it aff that meagre wage, you know what I mean? And she used to say, `oh, I wish the day was done’. And eh, tell me her troubles, her trackles, what she hid tae dae for her bairn and that; nae help that sort o' thing, and that brought that tae mind. And then I used to think on my own aboot how ill divided the world wis. My mother put me into service for a period; tried to make me genteel you know. She gave me a lovely outfit but it did'na suit me; it was the worst thing she could have did because I saw right away the contrast between their homes and ours, you know, thon's o' the gentry and ours.”

`Ten and nine’ (ten shillings and nine pence) referred to what the jute workers earned; interestingly it was this song that Norman Buchan Labour MP credited with turning him into a socialist. In the 1950s, Ewan MacColl had visited Dundee and had commented on the seeming lack of Dundee songs. Mary approached MacColl and soon after she was appearing regularly in folk clubs and even on TV, where she performed her own song, “The Jute Mill Song”, or “Oh dear me” as it was also known. Later a collection of her poems entitled “Sidlaw Breezes” (the Sidlaw Hills are near Dundee) was printed.

Mary’s later interest in Scottish nationalism lead her into conflict with the Communist Party, as did the manner of her condemnation of the excesses of Stalin, which lead to her expulsion from the Party.

A fragmented autobiography was started by Mary called “No sae Lang Syne – a tale of this City” (1971). Mary Brooksbank died 16th March 1978 (not 1980 as sometimes stated elsewhere) aged 82, and after her death a library was named after her. When the library was closed, a new premises, the Brooksbank Centre was named after her. Mary also had a song dedicated to her “The Bawbee birlin” written by Michael Marra and Rod Paterson.

Source: Interview with Mary Brooksbank by Hamish Henderson:
SA 1968.317, Mary Brooksbank, A4, School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh.

Further reading: thesis on Mary Brooksbank by Siobhan Tollard, "Bonny Fechters”; also, “Women in Scotland, 1900 - 1950" by Sheila Livingstone; Dundee Courier - Obituary 17th March 1978. Thanks to Tim on Mudcat web site and Mike Arnott of Dundee Trades Union Council.

Michael Walker

George Brown

George's parents, Frances Brown and Mary Lackey, migrated from Kilkenny to Manchester in the closing years of the 19th century and married there in May 1897. The fourth child in the family, like all of his siblings but the fifth and last child he was actually born in Ireland on one of his mother’s lengthy trips back home on 5th November 1906 in Thomastown, Killkenny.

Taken back by his parents into emigration to Manchester, he became a popular figure. He was a member of the Hugh Oldham Lads Club, an all-round sportsman, being a winner of the Metro-Vicks Works Sports in running and walking and also a good boxer. His father worked as a farrier for the railway company, and was a staunch trades unionist. The family lived in Collyhurst, part of what had been until recently the independent township of Harpurhey but was now part of Manchester.

George left school at 14; as a hobby, he found himself attending the Queen’s Park Parliament, a large hall owned by the Manchester Corporation that housed this debating society. Debates involving over 400 people were common. George joined the Communist Party during the 1926 General Strike. For a year, he worked for the Vaughan Crane Company at Gorton; then he had spells at Metropolitan Vickers in Trafford Park, the Corporation Highways Dept and as a building site labourer. In his work at Metro-Vicks and the Manchester Corporation Highways Department he was an active trade unionist, all the time maintaining his connection with the Irish Clubs in Manchester.

He became a member of the Manchester and Salford Trades Council and was a leading figure in the unemployed struggles of 1931. That year, George was the “stand-in” candidate for Chris Flanaghan, who was the Communist candidate in the Openshaw constituency but who was in Strangeways Jail serving a five month sentence arising out of an unemployed demonstration. Immediately afterwards, George was sent to the Soviet Union for a period of twelve months to the Lenin School in Moscow.

George Brown

Brown became an inveterate campaigner for the Communist Party as the Manchester District Organiser – he was also a member of the Central Committee. In November 1933, he was the Communist candidate for Collyhurst ward and, in 1934, he was a Communist candidate in Manchester’s Openshaw ward and shortly after was to marry Evelyn Mary Taylor. His enthusiasm regularly saw him drag a horseless lorry, which would serve as a platform, on to Albert Croft for Sunday morning open-air meetings.

In January 1937 he departed for Spain and was a Political Commissar of the International Brigade. In this role, his extraordinary energy would see him spend his days off duty from the Commissariat during the Jarama campaign in the trenches. Eventually, Brown was allowed to join the Battalion in action but was sadly shot on July 7th 1937 by Fascist troops as he lay wounded by the roadside when engaged in action on the Madrid front during the battle for Brunete, which alone cost the British battalion nearly three hundred casualties. He had taken part in an assault on the town of Villaneuva de la Comadea, a highly fortified position surrounded by trenches and well-placed machine gun nests. A funeral procession for Brown’s body was held in Madrid, at which delegates to an International Writers’ Congress, then being held in the city, marched.

“George Brown” North West Communist Party History Group (circa 1972?)

Isobel Brown

Born in December 1894 on Tyneside, the youngest of three sisters in a working class family, thanks to her parents’ sacrifices was able to obtain a high school education, subsequently winning a scholarship to Sunderland Teachers’ Training College. The experience of the First World War, like so many of her generation, shattered her previously firm religious beliefs and her acceptance of the norms of conventional society.

When Isabel became a teacher, a local NUT activist and member of the county committee of the union, her experience aroused a sense of social injustice. She taught classes of sixty or so seven and eight year olds, whose lives were rooted in abject poverty. Learning of classes being run by the National Council of Labour Colleges in the Boldon miners’ hall for the local miners’ union, she went along and was the only woman present. The tutor was Tommy (T.A.) Jackson (see separate entry), whose Marxist exposition illuminated her understanding of the world and won Isabel to a lifetime’s commitment.

Having joined the Labour Party in 1918, she was a foundation member of the Communist Party. Isabel married Ernest Brown, then a full time organiser for the Communist Party, in 1921. Although she was obliged to conceal this at first, since the prevailing employment practice was then to require married women to vacate their teaching posts, when she became pregnant she had to cease teaching and their son, Ken, was born in December 1922.

In 1924, Ernie was appointed British representative to the Executive Committee of the Communist International and they moved to live in Moscow. There, Isabel mixed in circles that included Dolores Ibarruri (Spain), Clara Zetkin (Germany) and Helen Stasova (Bulgaria). She was now set on a course that was to see her subsequently become the leading Communist woman of the late 1920s and 1930s. Ernest Brown was recalled to Britain after the arrest of the Communist Party leadership in the run up to the General Strike and the couple threw themselves into the struggle.

In 1926, Isabel spoke at the May Day rally in the Yorkshire railway town of Normanton. Seeing some soldiers on the edge of the crowd, she urged them: “Don’t let the ruling class use you against your own fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins.” For this, she was arrested and imprisoned for three months in Hull prison for sedition, or “committing acts and uttering words likely to cause disaffection amongst His Majesty’s troops.”

Five weeks after Isabel was released, the General Strike was over but the miners were fighting on alone, amidst grinding starvation. In the small village of Alltofts, in Yorkshire, she contrasted the treatment of the newly born Princess Elizabeth – later Queen Elizabeth – with the fate of miners’ babies. For this, she was again arrested and charged with sedition, the judge defining this as any action which set one class against another class. Isabel was sentenced to three months hard labour plus either the option of another three months or £50, a considerable sum, instead. Naturally, working class solidarity saw to the necessary collections to avoid the extra term.

Isabel was soon back in the fight, first in Scotland and then back to Yorkshire, where, in 1929, she was active in the woollen workers’ struggles against a 10% imposed wages cut. It was during the campaign to raise funds for the wool workers and then the Lancashire cotton workers that Isabel acquired platform skills as a unique raiser of funds. She was also a decisive figure in the National Union of Unemployed Workers’ Movement and saw to it that women developed their own sections. The first such contingent appeared on the 1928 march in Edinburgh, and between 1932 and 1936 the number of women’s contingents on the national hunger marches doubled. She stood for the Party in a 1929 by-election, achieving 4.4 % of the vote.

Isabel went to the Lenin School in 1930 to obtain for herself a thorough grounding in Marxist ideas. She became the driving force behind the British Committee for the Relief of Victims of Fascism, which inspired the creation of the British Medical Aid Committee and Medical Aid Unit. She notably led the international campaign for Georgy Dimitrov's release, organising a counter-trial to that being held in Berlin that was seeking the life of the Bulgarian Communist who was quite falsely accused of the cooked-up burning of the Reichstag fire. Out of this campaign came the Committee for the Relief of Victims of Fascism, which saved many lives as Hitler’s stormtroopers extended their reach across Europe.

Isabel was also a towering force in the "Aid for Spain" funds campaign. By her actions, during the 1930s, Isabel Brown almost personified the fierce determination of European Communists to stem the tide of fascism. She became virtually famous across the length and breadth of Britain as the key orator for the mobilisation of mass action, in turn, in defence of Dimitrov, for Spain, for the Second Front and for the Anglo-Soviet alliance. Her talent as a fund-raiser for all these causes was so widely admired that her interventions in the role of appealer for donations at meetings after mass demonstrations and at rallies was often more eagerly awaited than the main speeches themselves.

The Earl of Listowel in his memoirs described her as “(o)ne of my best friends … with no more than an elementary education but an extraordinary gift for tear-jerking platform oratory that brought in a great deal of money for the victims of aggression”. (www.redrice.com/listowel/CHAP4.htm)

She was by now the British Party’s national women’s organiser but was seriously injured in an air raid in December 1940 and never really recovered properly thereafter, having spent six months in hospital and six month recuperating. With her health in jeopardy, she thus scaled down her Party commitments significantly, especially after leaving the EC in 1945, although she did do work as a speaker for many years and remained completely loyal to the Party. She died just two months short of her 90th birthday on October 1984.

Sources: May Hill “Red Roses for Isabel” (1982); Morning Star October24th 1984

Eric Browne

On one day sometime around 1957, Frank Watters (see separate entry) was selling the Daily Worker outside Armthorpe pit gate; it could not have been a more inauspicious period. Yet it was Eric Browne who chirped up: “I’ll have one mate and send this half crown to the fighting fund.” He (born 17th September 1928) and his life long chum from school, Ted Hall, were Lancastrians who had traversed the border to work in Yorkshire and who were then living in huts for incoming labour.

Very soon they had become deeply involved in the militant direction that their pit now took; firstly after a strike over allocation of housing, then came the famous 1955 Armthorpe strike. Eric and Ted were practically a pair, becoming neighbours as well as best friends, and the stalwarts upon which the Communist Party’s once strong formal strength in the locality mutated into a generalised militancy; even their wives joined in the act too, especially Eric’s wife, Dot, who was a diminutive, chirpy Lancastrian of indominitable spirit.

In the late 1950s, both had became part of an elite bunch of men, who dominated the village and led it to its special role of the `spark that lit the prairie fire’ in Yorkshire, changing the entire political orientation of the coalfield. Jock Kane (see separate entry) was their leader but there was also Owen Briscoe and Sammy Thompson, all of whom became senior figures in the increasingly leftward bound Yorkshire NUM. Oddly, Arthur Scargill was somewhat distant from this clique.

He was a tie to the old days during the 1972 and 1974 miner’s strikes, when he played an important role in communicating lessons on how to conduct struggle. Very much in the spirit of being an organic part of the community, Eric became secretary of the Death Benefit Fund, being particularly pleased at how he had provided enormous financial relief to elderly pit widows, when the state would not do so.

All of the Halls and the Browne’s were solid supporters of the miner’s strike of 1984-5; indeed there was no stronger village in all of Yorkshire. Eric was personally responsible for organising the distribution of logs and ensured that children of the village had hot water in the community and sports complex by siphoning off the massive quantities of sawdust that arose as a by-product, utilising it for the boilers. As the NUM began to wind down, Eric took on the role of branch secretary, mainly helping widows to obtain their true entitlements; Eric Browne died on 26th June 1998.

Felicia Browne

Browne, who studied at the Slade Art School, was an accomplished sculptress. In 1934 she had won a prize for her design of a Trade Union Congress medal commemorating the centenary of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. But she is more regard in posterity for being the first British volunteer to be killed in the Spanish Civil War.

Browne was holidaying in Spain when the Civil War broke out in July 1936. She was eventually allowed to volunteer for a militia unit in Barcelona, after attempts to dissuade her by both the Communist Party and the leader of the unit. Browne was soon killed in action near Tardienta, Aragon, on 28th August 1936 while part of a squad seeking to dynamite a Fascist munitions train.

The National Archives have a publicly released security file on Felicia Brown. This starts when she first came to the notice of the Security Service. In 1933, while a patient at Guy's Hospital, she distributed leaflets and attempted to convert some of the nurses to communism. As a result, a watch was established on her postal mail, and it became clear that her home, in Bessborough Gardens and then Guilford Street, London, were being used as cover addresses for foreign mail being sent to Communists in Britain. The file includes copies of much of the intercepted mail, including some of Brown's own letters adorned with line drawings, as well as details of her involvement in Spain.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/releases/2004/may21/soviet_org.htm

http://www.international-brigades.org.uk/british_volunteers/militia.htm

Robert Browning

Born in Glasgow on January 15th 1914, where, after Kelvinside Academy, he studied at the Glasgow University; he then won a Snell Exhibition to Balliol College at Oxford. For the best part of his adult life, Browning was a member of the Communist Party, joining at university. There, his capacity to absorb the complexities of foreign languages with extraordinary precise pronunciation attracted attention. This led to him, on joining the armed forces in the Second World War, being despatched to learn Russian. He was then sent to the Middle East then Italy and finally the Balkans, where he ended up as the interpreter to the Commander-in-Chief of British forces. His later, strong interest in the Bulgarian, Albanian and Georgian languages stems from this period.

After the war, he returned to Oxford and, after a year, was employed by University College, London, where he remained for a very long period. He became a highly respected Classical Greek and Byzantine historian of considerable intellectual brilliance. His books included: “The Linear B Texts from Knossos” (1955), “Medieval and Modern Greek” (1969), “Justinian and Theodore” (1971), “The Emperor Julian” (1975), “Byzantium and Bulgaria” (1975), “The Byzantine Empire” (1981), “Festschriften Maistor”, “The Greek World” (1985) and Philhellene (1996); he was editor for a number of books in this sphere.

In 1965, he was appointed to the chair of ancient history and classics at Birkbeck College, where he remained until his retirement in 1981. A frequent traveller to Greece, he did not compromise on his opposition to the military junta that ran the country for a period. Nonetheless, in his retirement, he was prominent in the campaign to return the “Elgin Marbles” from the British Museum to their homeland, becoming Chair of the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles. Robert Browning died on March 11th 1997, aged 83.

Guardian March 13th 1997

Les Burt

Born on 26th April 1921. As a Barnados boy, having had had little formal education, he was passionate about self-improvement, reading avidly. An electrician by trade, he went to Yugoslavia on a youth brigade after the Second World War, working to develop modern roads. In the 1950s, he worked at Kodak in Harrow, selling the Daily Worker at the factory gate. He joked that this was the only way to keep his job because, ''if I was sacked, it would be seen as victimisation."

Les Burt (right) with then PPPS secretary Mary Rosser after his appointment as treasurer of the society in 1984:

After a period as full-time north-west London area organiser for the Communist Party, he also worked at Willesden bus garage and at Thrupp & Maderley coachworks. He was a candidate for the party in elections in Brent, coining his own slogan "Put your shirt on Burt'! At one point, he polled over 3,000 votes. Burt was a member of both the Communist Party executive and its London DC for many years. From 1984 to 1997, he was Treasurer and a member of the management committee of the PPPS, the co-operative society that publishes the Morning Star. Involved in the Watford pensioners’ movement in retirement, Burt also served in a major campaign to prevent the closure of the four West Hertfordshire hospitals. He died aged 80 on 4th August 2001, a lifelong communist.

Morning Star 10th August 2001

Alan Bush

Alan Dudley Bush was born in Dulwich on 22 December 1900. As a student at the Royal Academy of Music from 1918 to 1922 he won several prizes both as pianist and composer, after which he continued his studies as a composer with John Ireland and as a pianist with Benno Moiseivitch, Mabel Lander and Artur Schnabel in Berlin. He later returned to the Academy as a professor of composition, where he taught several generations of British composers as professor of composition at the Royal Academy from 1925-78

Another close mentor, from around 1915, was Rutland Boughton (see separate entry), a famous composer. In 1924, Bush joined the Independent Labour Party and a year later he became actively involved in the London Labour Choral Union, which Boughton had founded. In 1929, Bush entered Berlin University to study Philosophy and Musicology but his work towards a degree was cut short by the depression and the threatening rise of Hitler fascism. He returned to London in 1931 and within two or three years was profoundly committed to Marxism, joining the Communist Party in 1935. In 1936 he helped found the Workers’ Music Association, of which he was chair from the beginning until he became President in 1941 continuing in this role until his death in 1995. He was also WMA Director of Studies at each successive WEA Annual Summer School until 1975.

Alan Bush had early success as a professional composer with his String Quartet, op. 4, which was given a Carnegie award in 1925. Bush is credited with over a hundred works of composition, including his best known work, “Dialectic” (1929), op. 15, for string quartet, which followed his debut piece, “Relinquishment” (1928). This helped establish his reputation abroad when it was performed at the Prague International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in 1935. He also founded the London String Orchestra in 1938 and continued to be associated with it up to 1952.

Much of his pre-war music was written the most advanced of European idioms of the time. Later, he developed the idea of a `national’ style that was simpler, intending to make the music more accessible to a wider audience.

The Workers’ Musical Association acted as an organisational body for events, and as a publisher of working-class songs (both historical songs and newer songs written by contemporary composers). In 1934 Bush wrote the music for a theatrical pageant The Pageant of Labour at Crystal Palace. For 1938, a much bigger series of events was planned which included a production of Handel’s Belshazzar, a large pageant at Wembley Stadium, and a “Festival of Music for the People” staged at the Albert Hall. For the event at Wembley Stadium Bush wrote his “Pageant of Co-operation” to a scenario by Montagu Slater and André van Gyseghem (Bush, together with Slater, Gyseghem and Randall Swingler – see separate entry) were prime movers in mounting these mass pageants). The work was performed on 2 July 1938 by members of the London/South Suburban/Watford Co-operative Societies with the speaking parts and ensemble directed by Bush.

His “Truth on the March’ (1940) reflected the historical moment but, in the early stages of the second world war, he was banned – amongst others – from performing for the BBC for signing up to the Peoples Convention, although this was later lifted. Later, Bush was in the army, for the RA Medical Corps, from 1941-5.

He produced four symphonies, one of which was inspired by the 1930s economic crisis and another by the Lascaux cave paintings. In the immediate post-war period, he produced “The Winter Journey” and “Lidice” (1947), which brought the story of how the Nazis had liquidated the very existence of a Czech village which had been the centre of resistance that was now in the process of reversal by the post-war socialist state there.

His operas all have themes of social significance and the words of six of seven operatic works were written by his wife, Nancy Bush (see separate entry). In 1947 the collaboration in the field of full-length opera between Nancy and Alan began with “Wat Tyler”, a dramatic story of the Peasant Rising of 1381. “Our Song”, to a text by Nancy, was commissioned for the opening of the Nottingham Co-operative Arts Centre and was first performed by the Workers’ Music Association Singers, conducted by the composer in 1948.

In 1949 the newly-formed Arts Council announced that it would commission a number of full-length operas in connection with the Festival of Britain. Composers were to compete under pseudonyms. At the time of the announcement it was carefully stated that no production could be guaranteed. Four works were commissioned under the scheme and one of these was Alan and Nancy Bush's “Wat Tyler”. In the event, none was performed in Britain at the time of the Festival.

“Wat Tyler” did, however, achieve great success in Germany: it received two studio broadcasts from Berlin in 1952 and these led to a stage production in Leipzig during the 1953-4 season. This first run comprised 14 performances and the opera was revived again in the following season. In addition Bush received three further operatic commissions from German theatres. Other well-known operas of Bush are the “Sugar Reapers”, “Men of Blackmoor”, “Joe Hill, the Man Who Never Died” and “Guyana Johnny”; whilst “Voices of the Prophets” was more of a choral piece (1953). “Africa is My Name” also appeared in the 1950s.

Whilst always well thought of in Eastern Europe, under socialist governments, his ability as a composer was never given much scope for performance. A series of BBC programmes in the 1980s at last gave Bush the recognition he deserved as a British composer of distinction. Reflecting this, perhaps, Bush produced his last major composition, “Six Short Piano Pieces” (1983). Alan Bush he died in 1995.

Nancy Bush

A librettist in her own right of some distinction, she is, alas, better known for being the partner of Alan Bush. She wrote the inspirational lyrics to Bus’s famous opera, `Wat Tyler – men of Blackmore’ and also produced a diverse range of Brechtian translations, children’s opera and the song for International Women’s Day. An enthusiastic member of the Workers Music Association, she died aged 84 in 1991.

Morning Star October 15th 1991

George Caborn

Born 1916, George Caborn is still recalled as a towering figure of the 1970s Sheffield labour movement; a man of such honour and integrity that he is still highly regarded figure a quarter of a century since his death. Indeed, he had been awarded the Freedom of the City of Sheffield in 1981, a remarkable distinction for a man who was a member of the Communist Party all his adult life.

Caborn, as he was widely and simply known in Sheffield, became active as a shop steward in 1938 in the Heavy Engineering Department at Firth-Brown’s, the following year he joined the Communist Party, which he was to remain a member of until his death. He worked there during the war and was convenor, except for a period when he was at GEC in Rugby. He returned to Firth-Brown in 1944 as an apprentice trainer and was also a sergeant in the Home Guard in the factory. After the war period, he became a member of the Sheffield Area Committee of the Communist Party until 1980.

He was a member of the powerful Sheffield District Committee of the Amalgamated Engineering Union in January 1947 as a delegate from No 21 branch and remained a member until the end of 1950 when he came off the committee, having accepted a job as a junior and then a senior, foreman. This phase soon ended when, on the occasion of a welders’ strike, George walked out with the men, despite the fact that formally the issue was nothing to do with him. He was sacked for this but returned to the shop floor.

He was quickly back on the District Committee, by January 1952, as the No 21 branch delegate but from 1958 sat on the committee as the HED convenor. During the mid-1950s, Caborn was elected at Party Congress to the Executive Committee of the Communist Party and he represented the EC to the 8th Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1956.

The AEU Executive removed his shop steward’s credential in 1960 due to his sponsorship of a rank-and-file conference. Even so, effectively, he remained as convenor, simple reverting back to his branch role on the Sheffield DC.

At the end of 1960, he was elected AEU District President, a post he held until July 1968 when he was elected District Secretary. (In his period of office, the AEU became the AUEW as a result of a merger, very much later – after Caborn’s death - reverting back to the old title before yet another merger.) He remained in this post, and as Chair of the No. 28 District of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, until his retirement in 1981 and had also played an important role in Sheffield’s Trades Council and, in later years, was the Chair of No 28 District of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions.

George Caborn

He played a leading role in the formation of Sheffield Campaign Against Racism and chaired all its meetings from 1977 until his death. Chair of the Sheffield Branch of the British-Bulgarian Trade Union Association, he led several delegations to Bulgaria. In 1980, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Bulgarian trade unions and, in 1982, the Georgi Dimitrov Peace Medal.

As chair of the Board of Governors of Sheffield City Polytechnic, and for his wider services to promotion the education of young people, he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship. A memorial trust in Caborn’s name was established in 1985 to provide educational foreign travel to young people. One of George Caborn’s sons is Richard Caborn, the Sheffield MP and cabinet minister.

Sources: AUEW `In memoriam’ booklet (1982); George Caborn Memorial Trust leaflet 1985

Jimmy Callan

Callan was Conductor of the internationally famous Glasgow YCL Choir, which he formed in 1945 and led until 1960. The Choir won awards at World Youth Festival in Berlin, Bucharest, Warsaw, Moscow and Vienna. They turned down offers of recording contracts in Britain because they would not drop the word `Communist’ from their title. A 1960 recording of the YCL Choir for BBC Scotland of two settings by Communist composer, Alan Bush, of the Red Flag and L’Internationale are still widely used on TV and radio.

Callan became Conductor of the Glasgow Socialist Singers until 1968. In 1981, the Choir reformed and sang their `Liberty is a glorious feast’, from the Jolly Beggars’ Cantata, at the William Gallagher centenary celebrations in Lochgelly.

Callan worked for many years in a Glasgow sugar refinery, was an AEU gold medallist and died aged 79 in 1991.

Morning Star June 5th 1991

Cairns Marie

Married to Sammy Cairns, Marie lived in Moorends from the age of 10 years and was well known locally in her own right. At the age of 51, on Saturday 15th May 1965, she stood for her husband’s vacated seat on Sammy’s death, unsuccessfully but nonetheless effectively, in the Thorne RDC council by-election to join Bill Carr. Sam had won in 1959

Source – Communist Party election leaflet 1965