Bill Alexander 1910-2000
Bill Alexander commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and was for 30 years until his death a leading member of the veterans’ organisation, the International Brigade Association. In various capacities, from IBA vice-chair to secretary, he was a formidable defender of the honour of his comrades in Spain, doing battle in particular with anyone who used Cold War and anti-communist tropes to denigrate the memory of the 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles who went to Spain – and those 530 of them who gave their lives. Continues…
Dorothy Kuya 1932-2013
One of the Communist Party’s most important Black members from the 1940s to the 1980s was Dorothy Kuya. She was born in April 1932 in Liverpool, her mother a Liverpudlian and her father from Sierra Leone. He disappeared and when her mother married a Nigerian, young Dorothy took his surname and regarded him as her father. She and her family lived in Liverpool 8, which was virtually a ghetto, with mainly Black and mixed race families living in one of the oldest Black communities in Britain. Continues…
Clem Beckett 1906-1937
Clem Beckett was a champion speedway rider who throughout his all too short life put his political and trade union values ahead of fame or monetary rewards.
On 12 February 1937 he made the supreme sacrifice while manning a machine-gun at the Battle of Jarama. He was killed fighting Franco’s fascists alongside fellow communist Christopher Caudwell – journalist, poet, Marxist philosopher and novelist (using his real name Christopher St John Sprigg) – with whom he had forged a strong bond of friendship despite their contrasting backgrounds. Continues…
ALEC ‘SPIKE’ ROBSON 1895-1979
Alec Robson was born on 18 March 1895 into a coalmining family in South Shields. At age 11 he started work at the Cambois pit near Blyth, participating in 1910 in the national miners’ strike for an 8-hour day. At age 16 he joined a boxing booth, travelling country fairs and boxing for a living. He probably got called ‘Spike’ because of a South Shields professional boxer of the same name. Continues…
Charlie Hutchison 1918-1993
Charlie Hutchison was unique in more ways than one. A Black Communist who spent ten years physically fighting fascism and racism from Cable Street, Franco’s fascists in Spain to Hitler’s nazis in France, North Africa, Italy and Germany. Born in Oxfordshire on 10th May 1918, his father was from the Gold Coast (Ghana) and his mother a local woman. The couple had five children and Charlie’s father often traveled back to Africa and eventually did not return, leaving his wife in financial hardship as well as mental anguish. Continues…
Fanny Deakin 1883-1968
Black Country man, Unison activist turned PhD student and Midlands Communist Party Chair, Andrew Maybury, on reading the bare bones of Councillor Fanny Deakin’s life felt that “it’s not possible to stop yourself from being amazed by it. Single-handedly, for a Communist to win over a whole community to the extent that decades after her death people are still wowed by her. She was clearly both single-minded and so full of integrity that people believed in her. What a lesson for today’s politicians!”. Continues…
IVY WOODS 1914 -2005
Ivy Oliver was born in Holborn, London in 1914, living above the shop where her father was a grocer. In the mid 1920’s, after stopping a bailiff removing Freemason’s regalia from a tenant’s flat, he lost his trade from all the surrounding hotels when he refused to join them.
They moved to Bristol in 1926, where she lived for the rest of her life. Continues…
Sam Watts 1925 – 2014
‘They don’t realise that strength they’ve got, do they? They don’t realise that power they’ve got – the working class can change the whole history, as quick as that, they just don’t realise, they haven’t grasped it’ said veteran Communist Sam Watts in his stand out contribution to Ken Loach’s 2013 film The Spirit of ’45. Continues…
Shapurji Saklatvala 1874-1936
Shapurji Saklatvala, Sak to those who knew him, was briefly the Labour MP and then the Communist MP for Battersea North in South west London in the 1920s. He was a remarkable individual. Born into the wealthiest family in India he came to Britain in 1905. Originally for a short stay but upon meeting his future wife, who was English, he made Britain his home. Continues…