This was a first draft of a chapter from the biography of Bob Stewart I’m currently writing, tentatively titled Everything You Get Must Be Fought For. Much of the material here will make it in the rewrite but the chapter as a whole is, unlikely to survive. I thought I’d post it here as I loved learning more about my dad’s uncle. Many thanks to Rab’s daughter, Linda – I hope we can meet up again soon. Thanks also to Ros Sitwell who found material on Rab in The Daily Worker – it was enormously helpful.
Bob had named his first child after his father. When his second came along in 1906, he gave him his own name. To avoid the muddle of having two Roberts, two Bobs in the household, the younger son was forever known as Rab. However, as if to add to the confusion, Rab also went on to marry a woman named Margaret.
Rab became active in the trade union movement at the age of 16 when he began working as a printer which, in Dundee, meant working for the press baron DC Thompson. Today, of course, the company he founded is famous for being the publisher of The Beano and The Dandy – something commemorated by statues of cowpie connoisseur Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx situated in the city’s High Street. However, in the 1920s Bob and other communists viewed it as a bastion of the reactionary right wing press- its conservative leaning title The Dundee Courier being particularly critical of their activities. Although, to be fair, as Bob mentioned in his memoirs, the Courier was also pretty vituperative about Winston Churchill during his time as an MP there.
The 1926 General Strike was a turning point. Rab evidently played his part and was victimised for it. Thompson was furious with the strike and the damage it did to newspaper revenues. As a punishment he would only allow those who took industrial action to return if they made a formal apology and presented a document proving that they had left their union. Rab was one of those who lost their jobs. The sacked printers set up their own paper The Dundee Free Press which ran for around a decade. It’s likely that Rab had some involvement with this although in 1927 he came to London and found a job with the The Daily Chronicle and joined the National Society of Operative Printers. He became a shop steward or, as they were termed in the printing trade, a Father of Chapel and throughout the Second World War was an organiser for the Daily Worker League, drumming up funds and support for the CPGB’s paper.
Though our conversations about his family were rare, my dad always spoke of his uncle with great affection. My brother recalls an incident during the 1980s which shows the influence he had. When we were younger our family took both The Observer and The Sunday Times – the latter for balance. This lasted until the Wapping dispute when Dad refused to buy the Murdoch paper ever again in solidarity with striking printworkers. A small act from a man who was vaguely left but not party political. One afternoon during the summer holidays my brother was working as a pot boy and heard raised voices in the main bar. Dad was in a heated discussion with a holidaymaker from London.
It turned out that he was an electrician working at Wapping, and very pleased with himself he was too. Dad was politely refusing him further service, and the exchange went like this:
Electrician: I can spend my money how I bloody well please!
Dad: Yes squire, but I don’t have to take it. Goodbye.
As the man left with his family, muttering under his breath and the regulars sat in stunned silence, Dad said out loud, “I don’t mind a man scabbing, we’ve all got to eat, but he was proud of it. My uncle was Father of Chapel.” The bar then returned to its normal sleepy midweek hum, as Dad, now aware that my brother had seen this, told him, “Don’t tell Mum I lost my cool, I shouldn’t have done that.”
However, as well as his lifelong career in the printing trade, Rab, along with the rest of the family, also dipped his toe into secret work. Letters in various files in the National Archives reveal that in the mid 1930s he was living in Moscow and attending the International Lenin School. The ILS was a Comintern initiative founded in order to shape the outlook of generations of communist leaders from all over the world – in JT Murphy’s words it was to be “a real revolutionary university capable of training revolutionary workers for real Communist leadership.” Its most famous graduate was probably Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito followed by the GDR’s Erich Honecker. The idea was to fashion a revolutionary elite free from the ‘taint’ of social democracy. There was an academic curriculum focussing on subjects such as Philosophy, Politics and Economics although I imagine this was very unlike Oxford University’s PPE as taken by UK Prime Ministers David Cameron and Liz Truss and right wing Labour figures such as Rachel Reeves. There were further courses such as Trade Union Organization and the History of the Russian Communist Party but, most significantly, the school also provided training in practical underground political work.
Over the years the CPGB sent around 160 comrades to the ILS and, in keeping with the Comintern’s impatience with the British party’s less than stellar record in achieving revolution, the British recruits tended not to impress. Nevertheless, MI5 and MI6 maintained a keen interest in anyone found to have attended the school and letters from Rab during his time at the ILS appear in Bob’s files. First of all, the security operatives were focussed on establishing that the pseudonym Robert Ness written on the envelopes was indeed Rab. All the ILS students had to adopt aliases but the family gossip content of the letters was a fairly good clue as to the true identity. Of course there was little mention of Rab’s activities at the school and scanning them for secret messages turned up nothing. Vague references to old friends and various visitors coming and going were of interest but there was nothing conclusive. However, while Military Intelligence found little to interest them within these pages, to me they provide a glimpse about Rab’s life and the lives of other British communists in the USSR including his sister who had moved there at around the same time.
In the grand tradition of the British traveller, one of the first things that Rab encountered in a far-off land was a debilitating bout of dysentery. In June 1934 he wrote to his parents warning that there would be a period when there would be no letters from him as he was about to get very busy. His work had suffered as a result of his poor health and he mentioned that he’d lost weight but felt he was on the mend. He noted that he had to be careful of his diet but that it wouldn’t be difficult as most things were “barren” and he stuck to basic foods like rice and fish. Partly due to his illness he hadn’t yet seen “any of our old friends” at that point and was keeping abreast of current affairs as he could get all the newspapers there. He described events in Britain as ‘lively’ but Moscow was, in his view, the opposite apart from the rescue of the Soviet Arctic explorer Otto Schmidt and his team whose vessel, the SS Chelyuskin, had become trapped in polar ice and sunk. A daring air rescue was planned and, after weeks of surviving on the ice floes, the scientists were given a heroes’ welcome along with the rescuers. Unable to join in due to his illness, Rab relayed what he heard about the event from friends and wrote of the “tremendous reception” the explorers were given and the huge parade thrown in their honour.
Rab had rallied enough to attend celebrations for the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in the autumn that year. He mentioned the excitement of watching thousands of people passing through the square and being involved in the various celebrations. He was kept very busy but he did feel a sense of isolation about being so far from his family. In response to a letter from Bob which included a lovely account of my father at one years old – “ A mouthful of teeth and we toddling legs off which he falls every few steps but he is rather a good-natured kid and seems used to the bumps.” – Rab replied that he loved hearing about “Bill’s kid” but it brought home how much he missed his own daughter, Moira and had written to her in the hope of a reply. In a subsequent letter he writes of his relief to hear from her and her mother.
However, what comes across in Rab’s letters is how much the cultural life of Moscow, such as it was, meant to him. In one letter he laments that, after attending a film festival, there were no new films for him to see. He urged Bob to catch Chapaev as soon as he was able. A war movie by the Vasilyev brothers about a Red Army commander from the Civil War, it became one of the most popular Soviet films of all time. It was well regarded and won prizes abroad in the USA and France. It is also apparently, Vladimir Putin’s favourite film. Rab also recommended a comedy Jolly Fellows and mentioned that he’d seen Rene Claire’s On the Roof of Paris once again after reminding his father they’d seen it at the Rialto some years previously. He went on to remark that the festival had created tremendous interest abroad and there were great musical and theatrical programmes planned. He mentioned that Paul Robeson had written very favourably about the Moscow theatre and anticipated many more performers coming to the USSR. Rab was very much looking forward to this. Music was his first love – both as a listener and as a performer. Bob had written in a previous letter of Rab and his wife keeping them all entertained singing into the “wee sma’ oors” and his surviving daughter, Linda, recalls a man whose favourite thing was to browse the record stores after work and arrive home with a new LP under his arm. He also had quite a fine voice. In a letter from March 1935 Rab’s sister described him singing the Robeson standards ‘Old Man River’ and ‘Pretty Little Fellah’ – presumably ‘Mighty Like a Rose’ – at a party thrown for a visiting Harry Pollitt. It sounds like quite a raucous evening. Before the party Nan, her husband and Rab had gone to the theatre and saw the first three acts of ‘Eugin Onegin’ before making their way to Pollitt’s bash. According to Nan, Pollitt, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, remarked that Rab’s voice would “make all the women there want to have babies.”
The letters from this time reveal quite a bond between Rab and Nan. It must have been a comfort to have family so close by in a strange place when he could barely speak the language. He called round often, joking that it was mainly to pinch her notepaper. The pair of them tease and gossip about each other in their letters home but ultimately Rab’s time in Moscow was relatively brief. It was Nan who had decided to make her life out there. A decision she would soon come to regret.
I found the following document – a celebration of Scottish history through a communist lens, in Bob Stewart’s files at the National Archives. Been waiting for an occasion to share it and today seems as good a day as any.
Bob Stewart pictured on a visit to Moscow in 1961.
The following article celebrating forty years of the Communist Party of Great Britain was written by Bob Stewart and appeared in the September 1960 issue of the journal Labour Monthly. At the time Bob was 83 years old and had ‘retired’ from active work three years earlier. The piece is written from the perspective of being one of the last men standing’ from the formation of the CPGB in 1920.
“HISTORY will record that the birth of a Communist Party in Britain was the outstanding event of the 1920’s. The fact that it was nearly three years after the Bolshevik victory of 1917 indicates the difficulties encountered and overcome before it saw the light of day. Small as the event appeared, it was nevertheless the political culmination of more than a hundred years of British working class struggle against the rule of the capitalist class. These years had inscribed indelible victories as well as many defeats on the banners of the oldest working class movement of Europe.
Along the years it built the modern Trade Union movement which despite weakness, sectionalism and betrayal is still a powerful weapon and a training ground for militant workers. It embraced Chartism which meant the intrusion into politics of revolutionary ideas and practices on a mass scale. It eventually cast off the manacles of the Liberal Party even if it is not vet free from their illusions. It gave birth to the Labour Party out of the strange assortment of Fabians, Independent Labour Party, Social Democratic Federation which became the British Socialist Party, the latter becoming a leading component of the Communist Party, and was itself affiliated to the Labour Party. Due to historic circumstances which I have not space to detail, the Labour Party has rejected a scientific outlook. It rejected Marxism, abhorred revolution, and has spent half a century confusing and befuddling the working class with hopes that capitalism would change its spots or at least let the right wing leaders of Labour paint them a different hue.
Necessarily capitalism imputed foreign parentage to the C.P. as it had done to Chartism and to early Socialist or other progressive movements. The mud refused to stick. The C.P. was bone and flesh of the British working class. Of course it had and is proud of its international connections. That also is a fine tradition of our class. The more immediate circumstances attending the birth of the C.P. may be thus described. Prior to 1914-18 and during the First World War there were outside of the official Labour Party many of the most class-conscious and militant workers who were split up amongst a number of more or less Marxist sects, e.g., the Socialist Labour Party, Workers’ Socialist Federation, South Wales Socialist Society, and many lesser bodies in various localities. These were largely concerned about the purity of their gospel. There were also the shop stewards, the workers’ committees and many unattached rebels, New Age readers, Guildsmen, etc. Amongst them were great agitators and strike leaders who had with Tom Mann and others headed the struggles of workers on Merseyside, Clyde and elsewhere before World War I.
August, 1914, saw official Labour, like official Social Democracy, dip their flags of red and appear in the flamboyant colours of the capitalists they were supposed to fight against. A sorry spectacle indeed, relieved if but a little by the few who kept the flag aloft. The course of the war brought hellish experiences to the workers. Along came Military Service Acts, which gave rise to an Anti-Conscription movement, Munitions Acts, Rent Acts, high prices. Out of these struggles the clamant need for unity, discipline and wider understanding was arising here, as in every country.
Then came 1917, and the glorious victory of the Russian workers and peasants. The movement in Britain was reborn out of the fires of war. On July 31 and August 1, 1920, after months of negotiation, a convention was brought together in London by the Joint Provisional Committee of the Communist Unity Conference, representing chiefly British Socialist Party, Communist Unity Group, South Wales Communist Council. (The unification was completed in the early months of 1921. The Leeds Congress in January, 1921, brought in the Scottish Communist Labour Party, whose leading members included William Gallacher and J. R. Campbell; while the left wing of the Independent Labour Party, including Shapurji Saklatvala, came in a month or two afterwards.)
At this founding convention in August, 1920, well-known figures included Bob Williams of the Transport Workers Federation, A. A. Purcell, Colonel Malone, William Mellor, Joe Vaughan, Arthur McManus, Tom Bell, William Paul and Albert Inkpin. Of the Provisional Executive elected I fear I am now alone. Some have done their day and passed on. Others sought other fields and have faded from my memory. The convention was serious and full of zeal, sharply divided on the question of affiliation to the Labour Party, but when Paul and Hodgson had finished debate and affiliation was carried the Conference agreed in unanimity. I recollect that after the convention finished on the Sunday, a group comprising Bill Hewlett of Wales, Bill Jackson of Sheffield, Frank Simpson of Perth, George Anderson of Coatbridge, Fred Douglas and myself from Dundee were steered by Jock Laurie of Aberdeen to what he called the ‘Merble Airch’. Before long we were spectators at a B.S.P. meeting. Jock said, ‘the speaker’s gey cauld’. Off he went and how he managed it I had not time to find out before I was hustled through the crowd and found myself making what I suppose must have been the first report back of the first Party Conference, which was received with great enthusiasm. Then to the train, where fate had delivered a very orthodox clergyman into our carriage, and did we baptise him!
That was our send-off. What have we to show for our Party over the years? Not enough but still a lot. We played our part in pulling capitalism’s hands off Russia. We backed and fought for British Miners when officialdom turned their backs and even their guns on them. We expelled even big Bob Williams for his part in the Triple Alliance betrayal of the miners. The defeat of the miners opened the way for attacks on engineers, textile-workers, seamen, etc. In all of these struggles our members were active. In the heat of these struggles some succumbed and left us for easier paths. We fought the opportunist heritage brought in by local Councillors or personal egoists. The Government of the day soon recognised the new type of Party. Raids were frequent, our General Secretary, Albert Inkpen, was arrested and sentenced, active workers, especially in the minefields, were doing time. Our organisation was still lamentably weak and sectarian. Printers were blackmailed into refusing to print our articles and pamphlets. We started our own printing works. Our editors faced libel and sedition charges, so that we needed a double shift, sometimes a treble one.
By 1924 we had our first taste of Labour Government, rather sourish at that. Johnny Campbell put the cat among the pigeons and very much upset MacDonald & Co. By 1924 we began to put new life into the trade unions through the Minority Movement whose secretary was Harry Pollitt, later Arthur Horner. So 1925 opened new economic battles. Government was compelled to subsidise mineowners and assume emergency powers. To prepare for the next round they arrested twelve of our leading members. They were found guilty of conspiracy to utter seditious libels. Six, with previous convictions, were given twelve months.
Six were offered release if they would forswear their allegiance. But one and all refused and served six months’ sentences. Further attacks on the miners were more than decent workers were prepared to put up with, so came the General Strike and wholesale arrests, office raids. This greatest confrontation of the classes in Britain in our time sent their leaders shivering to sell the pass and leave the miners to their fate. Fierce punishment befell the workers in consequence of this betrayal. Victimisation was common and hard, hard times kept knocking at the door. The miners survived their desperate ordeal. . . .
1929. Once again a Labour government which succumbed to American capitalist pressure. The defection of McDonald, Thomas and Snowden and their descent into a ‘National Government’ did not stop the economic rot. Unemployed relief was cut to the bone. These tested our membership and they withstood the pressure and nobly headed or fought in the ranks of the unemployed, joined in hunger marches, fought the police and won concessions. Meantime the German monopolists had been set on their feet again by American and British investments. But being unable to rule in the old way, they washed out the remnants of democratic practice and forged a rod of iron for Hitler to wield while they cheered him on to the fight against the growing Soviet power. Fascism reared its black flags in Britain too, but the working class showed its strength and routed it. In 1935 we scored a real Parliamentary success by the return of William Gallacher who by his Communist attitude did much to add to his own and the Party’s prestige. We led the fight and formed the British section of the International Brigade which saved the honour of the British working class in the battlefields of Spain. 1939: that fatal year that saw the outbreak of that most vicious war of the centuries. Here also our Party gave freely of its dearest and best to bring the war to a victorious end. When it ended the British workers’ stored-up anger burst through to the defeat of Churchill and placed their hopes on the Labour Government, which shooed them off with meagre reforms and played a sorry second fiddle to American big business so that once again our Party is leading the fight against further war.
Now we have established the Party as a potent factor in British politics. Our numbers have grown. We have lost many brave and able leaders but we have raised able successors. Our camp of Peace grows daily and despite provocation we know that the forces of Peace will prevail. All our efforts are turned in that direction. Our literature is improving daily. Our Daily Worker is known the world over. We are no longer the feeble body of propagandists that we were in 1920 but a strong virile Party worthy of the class we find it an honour to serve.”
How Bob Stewart’s death was reported in The Morning Star Monday 17th September 1973.
It is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of our great grandfather, Bob Stewart. As a major figure in the early days of worldwide Communist movement in Britain, the news was announced in The Morning Star the Monday afterwards. The announcement shared the front page with the major news story of the time – anti Pinochet protests at the Chilean embassy. A week later the paper reported his funeral at Golder’s Green Crematorium. The following month, reflections on Bob Stewart’s life by his contemporaries Rajani Palme Dutt and Peter Kerrigan were printed in Labour Monthly. We reproduce them below.
Honour to Bob Stewart
With a deep sense of loss Labour Monthly joins in paying honour to the universally loved veteran and Grand Old Man of the British and international working class movement, Robert Stewart. Right up to the completion of the 96 years of his event filled and fruitful life he remained active to the last, despite disabilities to give inspiration, counsel and guidance to younger comrades. My personal memories of him are so close already as a foremost fighter before the foundation of the Communist Party and his leading role in its foundation and in all its battles, that my thoughts turned back to the joy and pride which I felt at an early congress when I had offered some suggestions as a rank and file delegate from the floor in the discussion and Bob Stewart in his reply from the platform referred to what I had said as constituting ‘the most useful contribution’ in the discussion. Praise from Bob Stewart was praise indeed. Bob was always for us a wise counsellor and guide, with a record of manifold struggles, and an indomitable spirit, equally in spells imprisonment or in positions of responsibility and leadership. Harry Pollitt justly called him ‘a model and an example to all of us.’ John MacLean, honoured by the Bolshevik revolution to be nominated as the Soviet diplomatic representative in Britain before recognition, and a very close friend of our journal, already in 1912 described Bob as ‘the finest propagandist in Scotland.’ When he was first elected by the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party to the Central Committee in 1922, the first Central Committee elected by the Congress as a whole, it was a measure of the universal respect for him that Bob Stewart was one of the seven members chosen. Alike in his fourteen years of service on the Central Committee, as a representative in the international movement, in his subsequent service on the Control Commission and the Appeals Committee, and in all his ceaseless activity in every field, and personal contact, Bob helped to shape generations of working class fighters. On his 83rd birthday in 1960, when various trends of ideas were arising among some sections, Bob gave his characteristic guidance: ‘The acid test for a socialist anywhere is his attitude to the Soviet Union.’ All the condolences of Labour Monthly are expressed to his family and relatives. The inspiration Bob Stewart has given us lives on, and will live on, through the years to come.
Rajani Palme Dutt
Bob Stewart: February 16, 1877 – September 14, 1973.
BOB STEWART’s death breaks one of the longest living links in a chain of revolutionary struggle bridging two centuries. Even a brief factual record of the highlights of his tempestuous career would fill many pages. Scottish prohibitionist socialist, skilled carpenter, trade union organiser, conscientious objector in world war one, four times imprisoned for his refusal to fight, foundation member of the Communist Party and its first parliamentary candidate at Caerphilly in 1921, for many years on its Central Committee, and one-time Acting General Secretary, delegate to the Communist International, active on South Africa and Ireland, always in the thick of the struggle whether as parliamentary candidate fighting Churchill in Dundee or elsewhere in mass demonstrations of the unemployed and at political meetings.
Bob carried on his varied activities with unflagging energy and enthusiasm, until a few years ago when advancing years and the onset of blindness confined him to his room. The documented record appears, complete with dates and brief explanations, in James Klugmann’s first two volumes, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and, in more detail, written by Bob himself in his autobiography, Breaking the Fetters, published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1967. I want to speak of him from my own personal experience because this may be a contribution to creating a more complete picture of the whole man.
I will always remember my first meeting with him. It was in 1921. I had been paid off from my job in engineering and was chairman of the Springburn branch of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. We held a weekly meeting in the Princes Picture House, with invited speakers like Pat Quinlan and others mentioned by Bob in his book. The speakers had to climb a ladder from orchestra stalls to a narrow strip of platform on which was a table and two chairs in front of the picture screen. Up the ladder came this man, with the striking face, a long, rather badly broken nose and piercing eyes.
My most lasting impression was the speech and method of delivery. No one I have listened to since could do so effectively what he did. He would break away from the main theme to make a witty or acid comment. Sometimes he would develop the point, but always he would return to the main content. The thread was never broken, and when he had finished you were left in possession of the case he was making in its entirety. Of course, there were better orators than Bob Stewart, men like Harry Pollitt, Willie Gallacher and Tom Mann, to mention only some. But he was supreme in the way I have just mentioned.
He had an undying hatred of capitalism and its oppression, and could be devastating in criticism when he felt it necessary. One example comes to mind during this period. It was 1922 in Glasgow, when he was Scottish Organiser of the Communist Party. At that time there were a number of Party members, of whom I was one, who were strongly opposed to the Party decision to apply for affiliation to the Labour Party. We were at a Party conference and Bob read out the letter of resignation from one of them, which ended by saying that in the meantime he proposed to go back to his books. I shall never forget the way he spoke of anyone dropping out of all activity. and ‘going back to his books’ in the situation then confronting us. On the other hand, Bob was always prepared to help us younger, inexperienced and impetuous ones, with guidance and advice. He would listen carefully and then deal with the arguments showing how the particular problem could be solved, and often with a personal example or anecdote.
Bob was always a staunch trade unionist from his apprenticeship days when, in his last year, he joined the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. He was elected to the yard management committee at Gourley’s Shipyard, Dundee. However, he left because the employers offered to continue his job for a year at the improver’s rate ten shillings below the basic journeyman’s rate. From job to job, until, back in Dundee again, he became shop steward at Gourlay’s where he also worked on building the Discovery, which took Captain Scott on the national Antarctic expedition. It was in this period that Bob met and married Margaret Lang, and commenced a partnership which lasted till her death forty-eight years later, and to whom he pays tribute in the foreword to his book. I suppose in one way the high point of Bob’s earlier trade union activities came in 1915 during the first world war when he became local organiser of the Scottish Horse and Motormen’s Union, at a wage of 30 shillings a week, and went back into the trades council as a delegate. He would have been about 38 years of age at the time. He lost that job when, in 1916, he received his first prison sentence for having conscientious objections to killing his fellow men in an imperialist war and refusing to do military service.
I have dwelt briefly on these aspects of Bob Stewart’s career because the more outstanding political features are on the record and are better known to those who have been colleagues or have studied the history of the Communist Party and the British labour movement. Bob was an outstanding political leader, tested many times in class battles. He was a staunch internationalist and life-long friend and supporter of the Soviet Union. As I will always remember him, he was a great humanist, whose memory will be cherished as long as we who knew him live.
I have conflicting attitudes towards communists and communism. On the one hand, the sight of a YCL sticker in the gents of a Leeds bar last year prompted a warm glow of affection. It wasn’t something I’d ever expected to see in this day and age. It seemed so out of time. On the other hand actually seeing the YCL at a teachers’ strike demo a few months ago with their hammer and sickle flags brought out the feelings of contempt I usually reserve for the SWP and the right wing of the Labour Party. Clearly I prefer my communists in the past rather than the present.
I think it’s reasonable to be sceptical that the change we need can be brought about by anything declaring itself communist. The taint is there to stay. However, I can totally understand why people became communists in the 1920s and 1930s in the light of escalating poverty and mainstream politicians’ indifference to do anything about it. A century later and we’re in much the same position. With that in mind I recently listened to the audiobook of China Mieville’s A Spectre, Haunting. It’s a commentary on Marx & Engels’ The Communist Manifesto. Fiercely argued and compassionate it’s a powerful defence of the text and a good antidote to cynicism.
The last section is a reworking of Engels’ The Principles of Communism and I’m going to quote it at length here because I found it profoundly moving and it made me cry on the walk to work.
Early on Mieville asserts what it means to be on the left in this day and age. “It is to say that we deserve better, and that betterness is not impossible.” He then outlines a symptom of modern capitalism – the ruling of the US Supreme Court that “Nestlé has no responsibility, no guilt, for the use of child slavery in its supply chain.” This is not because the company were unaware of these circumstances but that they’re not responsible because it’s beyond the jurisdiction of the court. Nestlé has, “authority from the highest court in the most powerful state in human history to outsource slavery.” Mieville goes on:
“Welcome to capitalism. No, before you say that thats a terrible anomaly, or a questionable ruling, or a regrettable side effect of a flawed but otherwise decent system, or anything, ask yourself, how many such does it take before you can diagnose a fundamental dynamic? A way of things? Welcome to capitalism, where in the heart of ‘civilisation’ outsourced child slavery is acceptable. To be a communist is to say not just that this is a world of systematic barbarism and cruelty, not just that this is what it is to always prioritise profits over people, but that the system that does this is strong, and adaptable, and seeps into every area of our political and economic and cultural and psychic lives, and so whatever bulwarks and defences and counter-attacks we make against it, as we have done and will again, they will always be embattled, strained, constrained, rowed back, pushing against the fundamental tide of a society in which the vast majority of people are expendable for the profits controlled and sought by a very few. To be on the right is, at base, to say at very minimum that nothing can change, nothing can be done, systematically, to alter that system – if not that such a system is desirable, and that it’s more important that some have the power to control the world, even if that means others in vast numbers suffering and being without power. To be on the Right is even, increasingly, to say that that suffering is a good in itself And for all that there are those who’ve made their peace with power or enjoyed the cruelty of the moment, this isnt, moralistically, to separate people into Good and Bad. Capitalism implicates us all. We can’t live outside of it we can’t think outside of it. No wonder the circuses that increasingly take the place of bread appeal, even against our own better angels. But the system isn’t seamless, and we can all change our minds, and the world. None of us is born a communist, any more than we’re born capitalists, or sadists. And is it any wonder that for whatever knowable and unknowable reasons individual minds change, they change en masse when history changes? How many times has the utter impossibility of change been proved, only for change to rock the world and throw up everything we thought we knew? Open up a glimmer to a life worth living, is it not possible, likely, that millions of people who now see no prospect of any fight ever making this a habitable world, who’ve been encouraged by our rulers to believe absolutely that the sum total of their input in the grand decisions of history is at best ten to fifteen crosses on a ballot paper for parties they don’t control and which betray them at every turn, might suddenly decide that in fact the fight is worth it, not only in principle, but because it might, just possibly, win? And those who don’t? Who, in the face of a prospective crack in history, push back and fight for this regime? They won’t be the enemies of the communists, then, they’ll be the enemies of humanity, a humanity changing and liberating itself, and that’s no licence for cruelty or spite, but it’s legitimate to struggle as hard as you must against the enemies of a better world. Yes, we know that even many who love us are bewildered by our ‘unrealism’, our la-la land dreamwork, our utopian foolishness, in striving for wha we strive for: but can you understand how unrealistic their beliefs are to us? Their wager that this system, this carnival of predatory rapacity, will ever be fit to live in? Their sad certainty that we can do no better?”
The final part of this section asks how people could achieve a better world. It around this point I started to well up.
“By the elimination of private property and its replacement by community of property. By rupture. Yes, we will change the existing state of things. Not ‘we’ communists: ‘we’ all of us who come to believe through the slow accretion of tiny victories and of defeats, too, by experiencing the solidarity of others directed at us and ours at them; we who change our minds when the blared lie that ‘Nothing can ever be different is heard for the lie it is, whether or not difference follows; we who reach the tipping point where this unliveable disempowering tawdry ugly violent murderous world can no longer be lived; we who don’t believe the barked insistence that the best targets for the exhausted rage that follows are black people or brown people or Jews or Muslims or queers or trans people or migrants or children in cages; we who for whatever reasons don’t succumb to or who recover from the sadism that is inculcated and encouraged by this same system that endlessly hoses down true sentiment with caustic sentimentality; we who come to believe not only that we deserve better, but that there is a chance, a chance that we can build that betterness. Yes. Yes we will change the existing state of things. Not we will in the sense of it is inevitable but in the sense of it is not impossible, in the sense that it is necessary, that it is utterly worth the wager and the fight. In the sense that living with that Yes smouldering at the core of you, next to, as, ultimately stronger than the also smouldering No of necessary hate, is the only way to come close to existing, to living as a human, in so foul and monstrous and in- and anti-human a system. Yes. Yes we will change the existing state of things.”
Apologies to those YCL members at the demo. I have huge issues with the (several) iterations of the British Communist Party but if you see yourself in Mieville’s words here then we’re not so far apart.
The ScotsmanJim LarkinShapurji Saklatvala Bob Stewart
At the moment I’m working on a biography of Bob Stewart. Hopefully this will build on what he revealed in his memoirs and will offer a fuller picture of his political and clandestine life and how this affected his family. I’ve just finished writing a chapter on his activities in Ireland in the 1920s when he was tasked with trying to set up an ‘Irish Marxist Party’. As part of the research, I came across this news article from The Scotsman that hopefully gives a little more of an idea of how Bob’s activities were viewed at the time.
Alan Stewart.
COMMUNISTS IN IRELAND.
ACTIVE CAMPAIGN OPENED.
TO PROMOTE A ” WORKERS ‘ REPUBLIC . “
(FROM A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.)
Fishing in troubled waters is, and has always been, a favourite pastime of Communist agitators , and in the Irish Free State they have had opportunities for its prosecution, of which they have promptly availed themselves from time to time. During recent years they have made repeated attempts to take advantage of the unsettled conditions in order to spread discontent and carry on their propaganda . It will be remembered that when a considerable part of the South was held by the armed supporters of Mr De Valera they seized the opportunity afforded by the disorders to raise the Red Flag and to establish Soviets in Tipperary and Clonmel . The only consequences of their activities then, however, was the destruction of creameries and other works and the ruin of the workers.
Subsequently there was a lull in the Communist propaganda, although now and again Mr Jim Larkin and a few others made efforts to instil life into the movement. Larkin has been twice at least in Russia during the past eighteen months, and the fact that he is a welcome visitor there is in itself significant . He claims to be a recognised link between Moscow and Ireland, and to have been appointed to some sort of official position as a delegate or deputy from the Bolshevists to the Free State.
A DANGEROUS DOCTRINE.
Lately there has been a revival of Communist agitation, and an active campaign has now been inaugurated in Dublin, where a public “demonstration” has been held beneath the folds of a Red banner said to have been sent by “the Russian proletariat” to their “Irish comrades.” The chief speakers at this “demonstration” came from Great Britain. They were Mr Saklatvala , the Communist MP for North Battersea and Mr Robert Stewart , of Dundee. Mr Saklatvala (who spoke for nearly two hours) declared that the revolutionary method was the only one that would befriend the working classes and Mr Stewart pledged himself that before the end of next month an organisation will be established in the Free State for the promotion of a Workers’ Republic. Mr Stewart, who recognises, as Irish agitators have done before, the value of land hunger as a , political weapon, appealed to workers if they wanted land to take it, and legalise their action afterwards. A dangerous doctrine and all the more dangerous that it has always been a popular one among a large class in Ireland. One of the troubles which the Free State government is experiencing arises from the illegal seizure of land in some of the Western counties at this moment.
While the Government do not, it is understood, take the Communist irruption into the Free State very seriously at present, they are watching developments with great care. They recognise that the real danger of the campaign which has been inaugurated lies not in its political propaganda, however pernicious, but in the possibility of resort being made to the weapons of terrorism and violence. Any association with Moscow cannot fail to be disquieting , especially at the present juncture.
The Scotsman Friday 24 April 1925
POSTSCRIPT
A shorter version of the story appeared in the Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner on Saturday 25 April 1925.
A Workers’ Republic
Addressing a meeting in the Mansion House on Sunday Mr. Saklatvala said the revolutionary method was the only method that could befriend the labouring classes. They seeded a great revolutionary measure by which boards of directors could be set aside and representatives of the working class take their places. British Labour betrayed the Irish workers when they were fighting for their freedom.
Mr. Bob Stewart, Dundee, said if the workers wanted the land of Ireland for the people they must take it and legalise it afterwards. Before the end of May he would have established in Ireland an organisation whose object would be a Worker’s Republic.
Portrait of Bob Stewart taken by Edith Tudor-Hart.
Oft in the stilly night,
Ere slumber's chain has bound us,
Fond memories bring the light,
Of other days around us.
Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
At the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held in Moscow in 1961, I met among others an old man whom I discovered was one of Lenin’s oldest companions, even in the days before the Russian Communist Party was formed. We had a long discussion about politics past and present, and the Communist Parties past and present, with particular emphasis on the difficulties of the days long since gone; and naturally, as old people do, we discussed ages. Petrov, the man with whom I was having the discussion, was then eighty-seven years, and I eighty-four years. In all this welter of reminiscence I said to Petrov, “We must meet at the dawn of Communism.” “All right,” he replied. “We shall meet in Moscow in 1980.” So that’s a date, though I have had doubts of whether Petrov and I will be able to keep it. However, I heard Petrov speak on a radio programme from Moscow in April 1966 and my spirits revived. I certainly have no intention of throwing in life’s sponge at this interesting stage in world politics and so the meeting may yet take place.
Much more certain than the meeting between Petrov and myself is the dawn of communism. In all my political life, since the early days of work in the Dundee jute mills, through all the vicissitudes of political, trade union and social work, I have never lost my faith in the people to change the economic and political system which holds back progress to a full and happy life. Of course there have been the ups and downs. That is life, and it is part of political life as well. But as I look back with a mature eye to the days of the early struggles of the Communist Party, I can see the giant strides that have been taken in Britain.
One of our first tasks on the formation of the party was to get clear what revolution meant. Our political enemies naturally pictured the revolution as a bloody civil war, as a destructive act, neglecting entirely the aim of the revolution, which is to transfer political power from the capitalist class to the working class. It is that transfer of power which constitutes revolution, whether it is accompanied by civil war as it was in Russia and China, or in a different set of circumstances, as it happened in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. In Britain and the countries of Western Europe it seems reasonably certain it will be a peaceful revolution achieved within the present parliamentary system, but changing Parliament from a showpiece into a workshop, legislating in the interests of the people.
We explained our main aim, the transfer of political power, patiently in speech and print; and gradually it became understood if not always accepted. Our second trouble in the early days was to get our own people to accept the idea that revolution in one country cannot be just a carbon copy of revolution in another country. In the early days it was common to find at our meetings five Russian posters to each British poster. Exaggerations took place and in some districts the party looked more Russian than British. There was a Smolny Institute in Sheffield. All this was very well intentioned but certainly wrong in the field of British political work. We soon learned that the major part of our policy and work must be for our own country-which does not exclude, nor can it, the greatest possible interest in the countries outside Britain, and in particular the greatest interest in what was then the only socialist country in the world, Russia. Even to this day there are people who talk of the Communist Party as a foreign or Russian party. Well, this was also said of the early socialist movement. It was falsely accused of being a German importation.
In its forty-six years of existence the Communist Party in Britain, in addition to being effective, active and militant in the workshops, has secured a large following of workers who respect it even if many of them, as yet, have not joined. The party has had great success in education for scientific socialism, in all aspects of Marxist philosophy. In its daily news-paper, the Morning Star (for many years the Daily Worker), in its weekly and monthly publications, in many thousands of pamphlets and books, there has been the necessary explanation of the political events which has been read, appreciated and discussed by millions of people. In the times when the labour movement was in retreat, the political discussion and action arising from these political explanations held the movement together and laid the basis for future advance. It may be idle to speculate where the British socialist movement would have finally landed if it had not been for the work of the Communist Party, but it is a fact of life that many times in the last forty-six years, in government and out of it, the Labour Party has moved far away, very far away, from socialist principle and practice. The criticism of the work of the labour movement by the Communists has many times assisted in bringing the movement back to policy and practice that represented the interests of the working class and condemned capitalism.
This condemnation of the capitalist system is at the centre of working-class politics. Condemnation is needed, not because the individual boss is bad, or a group of bosses treat their workers badly, although this frequently happens. We don’t object to capitalists as good husbands to their wives and good fathers to their children. What we object to is the miserable way they make their living, by exploiting the workers, by making profit out of the labour of the workers. The capitalists are parasitical, yet they get a much better living than the workers. The aim of the Communists in politics is to end capitalism and the capitalists’ parasitical existence. The Communists take a Marxist scientific view of events. We don’t live in the clouds, although it was a member of the Communist Party who first soared into space and it is the Soviet Union which leads the world in space exploration.
We know how and why capitalism came into existence. It was not born overnight. It had to destroy the handicaps and barriers to its progress from the reactionary feudal system which it superseded, and with quite a bloody red hand. There was no nicety about the emergence of capitalism. In many countries kings literally lost their heads. The British capitalists conveniently forgot about King Charles being beheaded when Russian capitalism was overthrown, and they condemned the killing of the Tsar. They forgot they themselves had set an example.
The Communists know that capitalism is not an everlasting system, and that just as it displaced feudalism and mercantilism in order to develop the production processes and meet the needs of the people, so now is socialism necessary to break the capitalist stranglehold on production to meet the needs of the present day. Feudalism became a fetter on production and the capitalist system took the fetter off. Now the people will end the capitalist system which has become a barrier to developing production. Socialism must come to provide a better and more scientific system in which the means of production will be owned by the community and work will become a virtue and not a drudge.
In the early days of the party we had to argue from theory alone. We have now in the course of history reached a stage when theory has become practice. As Lenin said, “Theory is grey but the tree of life is green.” So the green tree is growing, and now in the Soviet Union and China and in the other socialist countries there is the evolution of new industrial techniques to meet the requirements of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first which is not so far away. It was easy in the early days for the capitalists and the Labour leaders to sneer at the size of the Communist Party, to jeer at our utopianism, but great developments have taken place and are continuing to take place in the socialist countries. The opponents of socialism can’t jeer away a new town, vast new industrial automated plants, great new industrial regions, some of which produce more than the entire production of some of the advanced capitalist countries.
For example, the British or United States railwaymen can’t say to the Russian railwaymen “Wait till you catch up with us”, because the Russian railways are now far in advance in all modern railway techniques. This is not because the Russian railwaymen are born better, but because their industry is more modern and because socialist practice in the Soviet Union has electrified more railways than has all the capitalist world put together.
People all over the world can see, if they want to see, the fundamental difference between socialist industry and capitalist industry. In the socialist states the trade union office is in its rightful place, inside the factory, not pleading for a bigger share of the cake, but as an essential part of the running of the factory and taking part in every discussion and decision on production and labour conditions. There are no brass hats in the factory who have the last word on what is to happen to wage increases and hours of labour. In the socialist states the day of the brass hats is over and their obstructing power flung into the dustbin of history.
In 1917 there were 300,000 Communists in Russia. Today there are 12,000,000. Twelve million devoted scientific workers can make a tremendous productive difference in an old economy. As they lead the Russian workers in operating the new modern industrial techniques in the vast new industrial plants, great new production targets are set and broken, set and broken again and again. Production is rising to vast new heights.
I remember vividly my first journey to Russia in 1923, the tremendous thrill I experienced when I crossed the frontier. “Ours!” I said, “a country which the workers own and control.” On that first trip from Riga to Moscow I shared a compartment with Vassili Kolarov, his wife and two young sons. Kolarov, who became head of the People’s Republic in Bulgaria, was the bosom companion of Georgi Dimitrov with whom he worked for many years, sharing the disappointments of the stagnant periods and the joys of the revolutionary periods. Georgi Dimitrov of course became famous after the Reichstag fire trial in Hitler Germany, but at that time, in 1923, he was just “one of the boys” with whom I later had the pleasure of working.
Looking back on the Russia of my first visit, how right I was to be immensely proud of entering a country which was owned and controlled by the workers, in which capitalism had been overthrown! How right I was in my judgment that this land of socialism would transform the lives of the people and in doing so set an example to the workers all over the world!
It is not a question of rivalry between country and country. Progress does not rest on the character of persons or nations. It is a question of science being applied to the most important thing that human beings engage in, that is making a living, and in our day making a living means giant production for giant populations, the elimination of hard labour, using the machine to release the workers from hard toil and to reduce the hours of labour and give the workers more and more leisure time. There are so many things to do, so many things to learn, that no person lives long enough to do and learn even a fraction of them, even the cleverest of us, and most of us are not too clever. At the age of ninety years there are many things I still want to do, still want to learn to do.
On looking back over the many years of work of the British Communist Party we should remember the positive as well as the negative features. Never at any time did we admit the hill was too steep or the mountain too high to climb. Our attitude has always been “How can we overcome?” and by our work we have overcome the one-time hostility of many millions of people who, while in open discussion they will not say too much, nevertheless in private conversation will admit how impressed they are with the work of the Communists and the Communist Party. Millions of people now understand perfectly well that the Communists are not the “troublemakers” the capitalist press, the T.V. and the radio would like to brand them, but honest, sincere people who work for a fundamental political change. This has been a long process.
In the early twenties the Communist Party fought with the miners, tried to mobilise the entire labour movement to the side of the miners. The Communists gave everything they had in support of A. J. Cook in his fight for “Not a minute on the day–Not a penny off the pay’. It was the Communist Party who expelled Bob Williams from their ranks because of the part he played in destroying the triple alliance of miners, railway and transport workers.
In the General Strike we knew more of what was happening than the General Council of the T.U.C. We did not spend our valuable time playing football matches with the police. We gave the striking workers leadership as their militancy developed. This contrasted with the T.U.C. leaders who got diarrhea and went chasing round corners following Lord Samuel and looking for a way to sell out.
After the strike it was the Communist Party who organised to reform the ranks of the working class and the unions for the political and industrial struggles of the 1930s. In the fight against the sell-out of the Labour Government by Ramsay McDonald and his associates, and against the anti-working-class legislation of the National Government that followed, the Communists were always part of the vanguard.
Then came the fight against fascism. I remember well the formation of the British battalion of the International Brigade which went to fight fascism in Spain. At first many ordinary Labour people were hostile to the idea, but as the struggle against fascism deepened and the fight for Spanish democracy against Franco developed, so did the understanding of the necessity of the fight against fascism grow. The International Brigade grew in popularity, and when they were repatriated from Spain under a decision of the United Nations I remember the amazing scenes at Victoria Station in London. Tens of thousands of people filled the station and crowded the surrounding streets to welcome the British soldiers home. Everyone felt that the Brigade had honoured Britain by their fight against fascism and had upheld the good name of the British labour movement.
In the struggle decisive changes take place in people’s thinking, and this leads to further action. The Communists said the war that ravaged Spain would come to Britain if rapacious fascism were allowed to proceed unchecked. We were right, not because we were good astrologers or prophets, but because we were Marxists and could read events better than other political parties.
In my many decades of work I have met, discussed with, worked with, and become friends with some of the finest people who ever breathed. Men and women whose main aim in life was to serve mankind. Men and women who came from many nations and whose skins were of different colours but whose aim in life was the highest of all: to serve. Many of these people are found in the pages of this book. Many younger than myself have died, leaving their mark on politics and political parties. Some of them greatly influenced my thinking and I want to write of a few of them who made a decisive impact on British political life. Not in order of merit: that would be quite impossible because they all had merits of different degrees, and in any case my prejudice, if I have one, favours the men and women who come from the workshops, a bias not entirely separated from my experience of life.
A man who influenced masses of people in Britain was Harry Pollitt, for many years the General Secretary of the Communist Party. An outstanding politician, Harry was virtually born in the working-class movement. His home was a socialist organising agency. His mother was a clear-thinking and capable socialist, and from boyhood Harry was forever on the stump. No doubt this early training was invaluable, because he developed into one of the finest orators in the British political movement. This fact was widely acknowledged by his bitterest political enemies, and remember he spoke from platforms in the days of great orators in other parties, Winston Churchill and Aneurin Bevan to mention only two.
But Pollitt was not only a very fine speaker. He had organising qualities few possessed. Always for Harry the question was “What is to be done?” Not only did he pose the question but he worked on it and tried to answer it. He applied himself diligently to everything he did and was extremely careful in the preparation of his speeches. This stood Harry in good stead when the shorthand notes of the reporting policeman would be put against his own notes in the Court cases in which he became involved. One thing Harry Pollitt proved beyond all doubt. The speaker who likes to speak has every chance to become a good speaker. Many times I have tired listening to speakers telling me how difficult it was for them to speak. Well, if they found it difficult to speak no doubt their listeners would find it more difficult to listen. The good speaker is one who feels he has something to say, a message to give. Anyone who heard Harry Pollitt in any meeting, big or small, found his speech lucid, powerful and sincere. While speaking of the needs of the present Harry could always paint a picture of how socialism could be won and the joy it would be for the working class. That was his great achievement. In both speech and organisation he brought many thousands into the struggle for socialism in Britain and many into the membership of the Communist Party.
Another man who loved to speak, and who was sometimes impatient of others speaking, was Willie Gallacher. He was an experienced workshop man who, in the period of the First World War, by his forthright stand against sectarianism, did much to weld together the famous shop stewards’ industrial movement which played such an effective role in Glasgow and many of the great industrial centres such as London, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham and other cities. Every. where the name of Gallacher was known as a working-class leader in the industrial and political movement. He was a man without self-interest whose life was devoted to the working-class movement and who made an unrivalled contribution to the work of the British Communist Party.
Internationally Gallacher became a well-known figure. When he met Lenin, he complained because Lenin, while praising his courage, attacked his political ideas. Gallacher told Lenin that he (Gallacher) was an old hand at the game of politics. Lenin’s justified criticism of Gallacher was published in that internationally famous book Left-Wing Communism–an Infantile Disorder. This book was sorely needed in the early 1920s when the young Communist Parties were making so many fundamental political errors. Because of Lenin’s advice, Gallacher discarded his anti-parliamentism and helped many others to do so. The negative attitude that a good socialist could not remain good if he went into parliament was strongly held in the twenties.
One very good characteristic of Gallacher’s was his ability to admit to being wrong on occasions, a characteristic not readily shared by a few of the leading Communists. Gallacher’s parliamentary career stands out as an example to those who believe that Members of Parliament can remain true to socialist principles and fight for them in Parliament. When he first entered Westminster he was portrayed as a revolutionary who wanted the streets to flow with blood. But he proved in his fifteen years in the House of Commons that he was a first-class parliamentarian. In fact he was one of the few who knew the rules of the House sufficiently well to break them and get away with it. His first thought in Parliament during any business before the House was: Will the working class gain? On that he took his stand, and his hundreds of speeches recorded in Hansard from 1935 till 1950 are essential reading for any serious student of British political history.
Harry Pollitt and Willie Gallacher are dead. Many others who gave all their life for the advancement of the working class are also dead. Albert Inkpin, Arthur McManus, Tom Bell, Tommy Jackson, big Jock McBain, the names are countless. All of them great working-class politicians and great companions in the day-to-day struggle.
There are a number like myself who are blessed with long life and are still working hard. R. Palme Dutt was one of my early mentors and mentor to many leading Communists. He comes from a remarkable family of highly educated people and I doubt if anywhere in the world, certainly not in Britain, one could find a political journalist who has made such a regular, consistent contribution to the elucidation of British political problems, particularly in relation to the colonial and ex-colonial countries. There is also that wee pawky Scotsman John Ross Campbell, familiarly known as J.R.C., who was in the early days editor of the Glasgow Worker and became, many years later, editor of the Daily Worker. He is one of the best working-class politicians and economists Scotland has ever produced. His speech is remarkably clear, witty and always down to earth. In those early days his workshop notes in the Glasgow Worker had a very wide readership.
And so I could go on, lists and lists of names, industrial and professional, all of whom made big political contributions to the struggle for socialism. One thing above all these older leading Communists understood was the fundamental Marxist principle: “That which is coming into being and growing is more powerful than that which is ascendant but is already dying away.”
The leading Communists of the past educated, trained and prepared the many thousands of Communists of the present who by their diligent and successful work have been elected to leading positions in the labour movement. This re-creation on an ever increasing scale is the guarantee that the British people will take the road to socialism.
The great world political argument rages. For Socialism. For Capitalism. The Communists understand that the aim of a modern political party must be to end capitalism. Not to keep it on its feet to totter around preventing the introduction of dynamic socialism. Not to agree to sacrifice by the workers in the interests of the bosses, but to end capitalism for all time. The Communists by their scientific analysis know that socialism will finally be victorious, and while in the Western capitalist countries the capitalist fetters may bind the hands of the workers for a few years yet, without doubt the tools are ready, well and truly sharpened to break the bonds.
In little more than a decade the call will change. Then it will be “For Communism!” I am certain, positively certain, that the world will see the dawn of communism, and I will frankly admit, despite having had more than my three-score years and ten, and a full and exciting life, that I hope, fervently hope, I shall be able to accept the invitation of my good comrade Petrov and be there in Moscow to see the Dawn. In any case, whether or not I live till 1980 or sign off sooner, as William Morris wrote:
On my return from Moscow I was sent to Ireland to work. At that time, in 1924, there was no Communist Party in Ireland, although since its inception the British Communist Party had given direct assistance to the Irish revolutionaries. After the Easter Rising of April 1916, there had followed turbulent years of working-class struggle. The Government of Ireland Bill was piloted through Parliament in the autumn of 1920. It provided for the partition of Ireland, with both North and South having a Parliament with restricted powers, subordinate to Westminster. There was a state of war until the summer of 1921, followed by six months of bargaining and intrigue, which ended in the offer of fiscal independence for the twenty-six counties of the South. The handing over of power to the provisional government was accompanied by brutal economic oppression and wage reductions, often amounting to one-third. There was a deep economic crisis and strikes were widespread.
It was clear that the political and economic conditions in Ireland necessitated a Marxist party with a solid basis in the Irish trade union movement. My work was to see how this necessity could be achieved. I was glad of this opportunity because I had met Jim Connolly in 1913 and I was also well known among the Irish for my work in Dundee.
Big Jim Larkin was then the best known trade union leader in Ireland and headed the biggest and most militant trade union, the Transport and General Workers Union; and naturally any hope of success in my task rested on my ability to interest Larkin in the formation of a Marxist party.
Jim Larkin
Jim Larkin will always be revered as one of the great line of Irish rebels whose names will never be forgotten in the history of the Irish working class. As a very young man he was already in the leadership of many industrial struggles in both Northern and Southern Ireland and in 1909 at the age of thirty-two he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. He said at the time that the total assets were two chairs, a table, a candle and an empty bottle to hold the candle, and a potential membership drawn from the Dublin carters who had just concluded a strike. By hard, patient and militant work he built the union into a real fighting organisation. In 1911 he launched a newspaper called the Irish Worker which sold 95,000 copies weekly and which was in itself a great trade union organiser and a splendid forum for left political opinion.
In 1914 Larkin went to the United States, as he said to interest the American Irish in the Irish at home, but he was soon at work in the United States trade union movement. His militant trade union principles and his left political opinions got him into trouble with the authorities. He was arrested and charged with “criminal anarchy” under a law which proscribed “the advocacy of force and violence”. He was tried in New York and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He did four years in the prisons of the United States and in 1923 he was released from Sing Sing by governor Al Smith, who at the time said: “Larkin has suffered enough for his beliefs.”
On his release he came back to Britain, where he had a great welcome when he arrived at Southampton. Many people, including Bill Gallacher, were at the docks to welcome him back home.
I spent months working with Larkin in the attempt to found a Marxist party in Ireland. He was, like myself, a total abstainer and one of his hates he had many-was strong drink. One of his first acts when he became a trade union official was to stop the then prevalent practice of paying the dockers their wages in public houses. He was a professed Marxist and fully supported the Soviet Union.
Working with Larkin and the other Marxists, both in Dublin and in the country districts, I soon found that one of my greatest difficulties was to keep the peace among our own people. Larkin was the biggest problem because he always personalised his politics. He would denounce this scoundrel, that scoundrel, in fact almost everyone in Ireland was a scoundrel. I think his experiences in the gaols in the United States may have had something to do with this attitude, but it certainly was anything but helpful in the political position we were in at that time in Ireland.
All the time I was in Dublin I lived with Larkin and his sister Delia and his brother Peter, who were political personalities in their own right. Peter had been a leader in the trade union movement in Australia and had done time in the Australian jails for fighting for the workers’ right to organise. But despite their similarity of political beliefs there were family squabbles. Jim did not speak to Delia and Delia did not speak to Jim, so they had to talk to each other through Peter. When Peter was missing I was used as the go-between. It was a dreadful position for grown-up people to create, particularly when to make any political headway friendship and comradely tolerance were an absolute necessity.
The house we lived in at Gardiner Street had a very large living-room. During the day and in the evening all kinds of people kept coming and going. It was a clearing house for all problems political and economic or even purely domestic. As people came and went there were no introductions so that you had not the faintest idea whom you were speaking to, or anything about them, and yet you were expected to engage in serious discussion and to give your opinion on the subject.
At that time in Ireland I knew it was much safer to keep certain discussions and opinions to the circle of people whom you knew and understood. In all this welter of coming and going, discussion and argument, Big Jim would sit in his easy chair talking to everyone, butting in the conversation and lighting match after match trying to get his pipe going, so that after a while he was entirely surrounded by burnt matches. It certainly was an odd scene looking round the circle. It was in this room that I had my first discussion with Sean O’Casey, the Irish poet and playwright, but I did not know who he was then. O’Casey used to say of Jim that it was his ideal to see workers with a loaf of bread under their arms and a bunch of flowers in their hands.
Sean O’ Casey
However, these were but small difficulties, easily got over in a day’s work.
I got on well with Larkin and I was one of the few men he really trusted politically. Lenin said of Larkin, “His remarkable oratorical gifts and seething Irish energy performed miracles among the Irish workers.” That was justified. He was a powerful and popular speaker, and every weekend we were out in the country or in a Dublin hall speaking at meetings and selling the Irish Worker. The paper had a big sale because there was usually something sensational in its pages. Larkin was continually in trouble defending himself against libel actions in the Courts. The Court verdicts were always against him and his debts piled up. But, of course, it brought huge crowds to the meetings and sold the paper.
The aim of the group I was working with was to plan a political campaign leading to and culminating in the formation of an Irish Marxist party. In Ireland at that time politics took a wide sweep. Poverty in some places was desperate, and it was necessary not only to recognise this politically but to do something about it. So we were constantly engaged in relief work. But a special more urgent relief became necessary. Flooding took place in Donegal and we placed part of our organisation on this relief work. I got together a three-woman team to take charge of the work: Mother Despard, Countess Markievicz and Helen Crawfurd from Scotland.
Countess Markievicz, Mother Despard and Helen Crawfurd
These were three remarkable women. Countess Markievicz was one of the famous Booth sisters, daughter of Sir Henry William Gore-Booth, a family of the Sligo aristocracy. In 1900 she married a Polish count, Casimir de Markievicz, but despite her background and marriage she was a revolutionary in politics. She took part in the Dublin rebellion in 1916, and was sentenced to death, which was subsequently commuted to penal servitude for life. She was released from prison in 1917. She was M.P. for St. Patrick’s, Dublin, 1918-21; M.P. for Dublin City, 1921-22; and re-elected for the Irish Free State in 1923, being the first woman elected to the Dail. Mother (Charlotte) Despard was one of the leaders of the British suffragette movement and without doubt one of the ablest women politicians of this century. Her work in the Women’s Labour League, the suffragette movement in defence of women’s rights, and her work in the care and needs of children, was outstanding by any standard. She was highly intelligent and an able organiser. Helen Crawfurd was a foundation member of the British Communist Party, a Scotswoman who was always in the thick of political struggle and one of the finest women politicians I ever worked with.
These three women formed a wonderful trio. With entirely different backgrounds they had worked miracles in the struggles for women’s rights, yet it took the flood relief in Ireland to bring them together. They organised relief in the form of food, clothes and household goods from Britain and the continent, and even made trips to America to get relief from there. I remember making a trip to Donegal myself during this period, and in doing so I learned a valuable political lesson about working in the Irish countryside. In Ireland at that period you couldn’t give anything away without a priest. In these small towns, even though the people were in really desperate straits, you needed a priest with you before they would accept relief goods. The people, of course, showed their gratitude and goodwill to all who did the relief work, but if the priest was not there it was very difficult indeed.
Very likely because of such lessons I have a healthy regard for priests.
During this relief campaign I met Father Flannigan. He was a hard worker and spoke at many meetings with Larkin and myself. He used to say to me, “Bob, your Lenin was a great Christian and should have spent his life preaching the Christian doctrine.” Naturally I tried to refute this and convince Father Flannigan that he was a Marxist and should join the Communist Party. He never did, but he worked miracles on the relief work and gave great assistance in building relief and welfare organisation.
Peadar O’ Donnell
I well remember another Irish Catholic priest in the same mould. In the late nineteen-twenties I was again in Ireland trying to organise a peasant delegation to visit a Congress in Berlin. To do this I sought the assistance of Peador O’Donnell. I knew Peador O’Donnell well: he was a member of the IRA and a staunch republican. He was also a famous author and wrote many novels, including The Gates Flew Open, being his experiences in the Irish prisons. I managed to interest Peador O’Donnell in the sending of the peasant delegation and we went to Galway to see what could be done. He was well known to the local councillors and prominent citizens, so we organised a meeting on a Saturday evening, which was very successful, in fact too successful, the drinking and discussion going on well into the Sunday morning. I remember the hotel keeper coming into the meeting with an emphatic protest that we must finish, because he said: “Never in my hotel have people been awake at two o’clock on a Sunday morning.” Before we retired Peador O’Donnell said to me, “Bob, I am going to Mass in the morning and if you come along I will introduce you to a rebellious priest if ever there was one.” Well, that coming from what I considered was a real rebel was something that intrigued me, so I inquired: “Who is this fellow?” “His name is Father Fahy and he has been expelled to the country for battering a bailiff who took an old woman’s cow to pay for her debts.” “I think I will come to the Mass,” I replied. Next morning we drove in a jaunting car to a very small village where we met Father Fahy. As we entered the room he was putting on his robes and his back was to us. “Father Fahy,” said Peador O’Donnell, “I have brought a man who has no soul to save.” “Ah well,” was the reply, “it will save him a great deal of trouble.” Then turning round he said, “But I know this man. I saw him often in Dundee when I was there. He is a great speaker.” “Ah,” I said, “you are Father Fahy of St. Andrew’s Cathedral.”
There was a famous Dundee story of Father Fahy. During the 1914-18 war (I was in jail at the time, but the story was well known) a number of soldiers from the Black Watch, Irishmen by birth, came to St. Andrew’s Cathedral for Mass from Father Fahy. However, along with the Mass he gave them a severe lecture, telling them they should be ashamed of themselves serving in the British imperial army, adding they should be patriotic Irishmen and go home to fight for Ireland. One of the soldiers reported the incident and Father Fahy was carpeted.
Not having a soul to save we did not waste time on Mass, but we got to talking over old times in Dundee. Politics and elections were discussed. “Well,” said Father Fahy, “Scrymgeour can thank the Catholic Church for his becoming an M.P.” Then he went on to tell me that in the 1922 election the organised Catholics came to the conclusion that Churchill did not stand a chance of retaining the Dundee seat. With two votes to be cast the three most likely to get them were Scrymgeour, prohibitionist, Morel, Labour, and Gallacher, Communist. “Morel as the official Labour candidate was certain to win,” said Father Fahy, “so we Catholics decided to give our second vote to Scrymgeour instead of Gallacher.” The Catholic voters then in Dundee were nearly 50 per cent of the total electorate. A glance at the election result of 1920 will show Father Fahy was right. Prohibitionism and Catholicism have little in common, if anything. But the Catholic vote, although be it said some Catholics did vote for Gallacher, certainly made Scrymgeour the Member of Parliament.
But to return to the position in Ireland in 1924. With the tremendous political campaigning and the prodigious relief and welfare work we got a good political footing in many Irish counties, but most important and best of all in Dublin. We decided the time was opportune to launch the call for the formation of a mass Irish Marxist party.
After much deliberation and argument we drew up a manifesto and organised a mass demonstration in the Mansion House. It was essential to get Larkin to sign the manifesto and I discussed this with him many times, always with the same result. “All right, Bob,” he would say, “I am thinking about it. What are you worrying about? I will likely sign it.” And he went about with the manifesto in his pocket for days but it was never signed.
The demonstration in the Mansion House was one of the best ever held in Dublin. The hall was packed to capacity, with hundreds standing in the aisles and the corners. Over two hundred people applied to join the new party. All we needed for a successful launching of the party was Larkin’s acceptance of the manifesto. But this he refused. My own opinion is that Big Jim would never accept the democracy of a disciplined Marxist party. He always had to be in the centre of the stage all the time, and so to join a party where the emphasis is put on collective work was not for him. Shortly after this I left Ireland with the feeling that a great political opportunity had been lost. In 1924 the political situation in Ireland was ripe for the formation of a Marxist party based on the Irish workers’ organisations, principally the trade unions. Larkin’s refusal to play his part in the creation of such a party greatly weakened the fight. The result was that much of the good work done over the years preceding 1924 ran into sand and failed to bear fruit.
Early in the summer of 1931 I went to Northern Ireland, to Belfast, along with Bill Joss of Glasgow, a man who knew the “Irish question” from A to Z and from Z back to A again. I remember him giving the Irish some lectures on Ireland and Irish history, both political and economic, that left them speechless and if you can do that to an Irish audience you are a master of your subject. Although their mouths were shut, many eyes were opened.
The Irish Workers’ League (the Marxist party) had its main basis in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Waterford, but was finding it difficult to get a trade union basis in Belfast. Bill Joss and I were there to try and help with this problem. We were no longer working with Larkin but with Sean Nolan and a number of the local members.
The republican movement was quite strong in Belfast and Dublin, and I thought it right and necessary to try and work closely with them. Their politics were quite progressive and most of them detested the booze, so for me at least there was this added bond of unity.
We held our meetings on the Customs House steps and they were very rowdy; many a donnybrook took place. During our meetings the place was alive with police trying to keep order and, I must admit, on occasions trying to keep the crowd from “getting at” the speaker usually me. Our opponents had another way of stopping us speaking. They would bring out the band with the big drum and stop in front of the meeting place, playing at top pitch. In this field of competition I could never compete and I never found a public speaker who could. On such occasions we packed up and then came back later when the band had blown themselves out or had gone for a drink.
Some time after I had left Ireland, Harry Pollitt told me of a chat he had had with the Chief Constable of Belfast. The Chief asked him, “Where is that flat-nosed bugger Stewart? The trouble I had with that man! He spoke for hours and hours at the Customs House steps and my young policemen got fed up waiting for his meetings to finish. He insulted the police. He insulted the Irish authorities. He insulted everybody in Ireland.”
The last rebuke was wrong, the rest correct. I have done a bit of insulting in my time, but that’s permissible when dealing with political enemies who insult the working class every day of their lives. I remember one meeting at the Customs House steps. The news broke that there were to be cuts in wages and unemployment benefits. This meant a big cut in policemen’s wages as well. I couldn’t resist a dig at that. With dozens of police around, I said, “Here they are, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, big, strong, intelligent, known throughout the world as the wildest and bravest men in any fighting force the Government says their wages are to be reduced by 10 per cent and not one of them gives a whistle.” I thought that would have caused a riot, but no, the audience burst into laughter and a few of the policemen even joined in. That’s what makes Ireland such a bloody nice place to work in. You never know what’s around the corner.
In the late summer of 1931 the Labour government was running into trouble and it looked certain that a general election was not far off. I was still parliamentary candidate for Dundee and the party there asked me to come over from Belfast to do a few meetings. The Belfast lads did not want to let me go, but I promised I would only be away for a week or so, and on that understanding I left. I walked out of the frying pan into the fire.
When I arrived in Dundee there was the usual welcoming party, several hundreds strong, and as always it was decided to have a demonstration, a march through the town to the Albert Square. It was not a big demonstration, but the Dundee police didn’t like it, giving a bit of provocation to the marchers en route. However, we got through the town and were entering the Square without trouble when I heard a commotion behind me and, looking back, I saw a young fellow being manhandled by the police. I went back to see what was wrong and try to smooth things over, but before I could say anything a couple of hulking policemen grabbed me and I was frog-marched all the way to the Bell Streel Gaol. Naturally there was a near riot as our supporters let go at the police for this unwarranted provocation. If they had let us alone for another ten minutes it would have been all over in peace, but maybe it was not meant to be peaceful as far as the police were concerned.
My wife ran about getting the bail money and I and five others got out. The papers were full of the incident and the word got around: “The police have got Bob Stewart and are kicking his arse off.” An exaggeration, but that’s what happens in such cases. I was speaking at an open-air evening meeting in Lochee, a Dundee suburb. Thousands assembled to hear the workers’ side of the story. The people were really incensed, and demonstrations went on for over a week. Mounted police were drafted into the city and further arrests were made daily. Another bad slip by the authorities, because this only further incensed the workers.
The Court case was a Fred Karno farce. At one point I laughed outright at the absurdity of it all. Two of the policemen who had picked me up and this was done literally-were big Geordie Clark, and big Ed Anderson. Both world champion athletes. They tossed the caber at the Highland Games like someone using a match to light a pipe. They were built like Aberdeen Angus prize bulls and both looked like one. Real Scottish policemen of the period. Mountains of oatmeal, and little in the top piece.
It was a snotty-nosed little magistrate called Paterson who heard the case. The charges were:
a) In Meadowside he (that’s me) assaulted George Clark, constable, and struck him with his fist.
b) Committed a breach of the peace.
c) Molested constables Clark and MacFarlane in the execution of their duty while arresting Grant.
d) Assaulted William Gorrie, constable, and kicked him and after arrest struggled with the constables and refused to walk.
In cross-examination, big Geordie Clark was forced to admit that I had been frog-marched to the police station. The magistrate asked me to plead and I said I would not; it was a lot of nonsense and absolutely irrational. “Do you think,” I asked, “if I wanted to assault policemen I would choose the world heavy-weight champions? Please grant me a little intelligence.” But Baillie Paterson, like most magistrates, was only a figure-head. The real strings were pulled from behind. He found me guilty. What a laugh; me, guilty of assaulting the world heavyweight champion and punching him in the face! Me, a wee fellow not half Geordie Clark’s weight! He could have thrown me as far as the caber with one hand. There never was justice in the courts and certainly this case was the proof.
So I went up the river to Perth Gaol for thirty days and, to add insult to injury, the magistrate in his best pompous style advised me “That in future, Stewart, you should keep away from crowds.”
While I was away from the crowds and in Perth penitentiary, the great Labour split came and with it the fall of the Labour government. In late August Ramsay McDonald had made his now infamous sell-out radio speech. A National Government, with the Tories well entrenched in the new cabinet, was formed all to defend the pound sterling on which, claimed Ramsay Mac, “the well-being not only of the British nation but a large part of the world has been built”. Cuts in unemployment benefits to the extent of £70,000,000 per annum, and cuts in wages. Means tests for the unemployed. But this only for the working class. No cuts in profits and dividends. No means tests for the rich.
On October 22, a few weeks after MacDonald’s “save the pound” appeal, the Daily Express published: “Baldwin’s ordinary shares have advanced this year by €650,000 in value”. Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Tory Party, and brought into the National Government cabinet by MacDonald, held huge blocks of shares in Baldwin Limited, a great steel combine. On the day the Daily Express published this news, Baldwin was stumping the country telling the unemployed they must accept a dole cut of 10 per cent to save the pound and save the nation. Equality of sacrifice was the slogan of the National Government.
In his sell-out of the working-class movement, MacDonald pretended to give it a decent burial. In his broadcast, with an affected broken voice and, presumably, tears in his eyes, he said: “I have given my life to the building of a political party. I was present at its birth. I was a nurse when it emerged from infancy. At the moment I have not changed my ideals.” But he had sold out to the capitalist class just the same.
I profoundly believe McDonald actually thought he was presiding over the death of the Labour Party and the British working-class movement. His ego was that big. But historically the working-class movement has an indestructible habit of moving on, despite all the predictions of its destruction, and MacDonald lived to see that.
With the Labour Party demoralised by the split, the National Government called a general election for Tuesday, October 27. I had come out of Cardiff Gaol to fight my first parliamentary contest at Caerphilly in 1921. Now I came out of Perth Gaol to fight my last parliamentary contest at Dundee in 1931. This time the prison authorities were not so lenient; they let me out of gaol on the Saturday before polling day, giving me two full campaigning days -if you include Sunday.
The candidates for Dundee were Marcus for Labour and Scrymgeour for Prohibition, the sitting members who had been returned in 1929. In the election they teamed up together, with Scrymgeour still seeking the Labour and Catholic vote. The anti-Labour forces put up two new candidates, Florence Horsbrugh (now Baroness Horsbrugh) for the Tories, and Dingle Foot for the Liberals, both, of course, standing on the Nationalist ticket. I was the outsider as the Communist candidate at least that was how it was meant to be, but this time we did shake some of the political pundits.
The main brunt of the Nationalist campaigning fell on Dingle Foot who was then a young man of twenty-six years of age. This is the same Dingle Foot who is now a Labour Member of Parliament, having successfully changed his coat and maintained his membership of the House of Commons. He is one of the Foot family of professional politicians which includes Lord Caradon, formerly Hugh Foot, and Michael Foot, the left wing Labour MP. The ‘old man’ Isaac was no fool at professional politics.
At this time Dingle was bitterly anti-Labour, anti-working class. In one of his speeches he said, “The National Government stands for sense and solvency, Labour for sob stuff and starvation.”
My election agent was a little fellow called Sweeney. He called at the Perth Gaol and we went over the election address which was despatched in the usual efficient manner. The people knew we were campaigning all right. Apart from holding our own meetings, our fellows went to the other candidates meetings and question-time became a furious battle. Most of the Foot and Horsbrugh meetings ended with three cheers for Bob Stewart and the singing of “The Red Flag”. When I came out of prison on the Saturday, my first job was to lead a delegation to the Public Assistance for a number of hardship cases. There were some families then in real poverty. On the Sunday night we held a huge meeting at the Albert Square with an audience of 5,000 and great enthusiasm. Some of our lads began to talk of victory and I had to caution them, although the support we were receiving was our best ever in any election campaign.
But I was long enough in the political tooth to understand what was going on. The election campaign was one of the dirtiest in history. Every stick was used to beat the candidates standing against the National candidates. We were called traitors, saboteurs, wreckers no word, no turn of phrase, was bad enough to stampede the people and gain National votes.
In Dundee unemployment was high and to find work was an impossible task for the unemployed. In the final days of the election, the local newspaper, the Courier and Advertiser, published an interview with a Mr. Charlie Finch, who was reported to be about to open a bottle and glass factory in Dundee, employing 950 workers. But, emphasised Mr. Finch, he would only open the factory if the National Government were returned. Well, they were, but I never heard of the opening of Mr. Finch’s glass factory. This was the sort of thing that went on. Nothing was base enough to blacken the opponents of the National Government, nothing too low to win “National” votes.
Nine days before the poll the Courier and Advertiser published a prominent article praising another “National” leader who was then making his way in the world. His name was Adolf Hitler and according to the Courier he was the man who was to save the German nation.
On the final rally night-Monday-Dingle Foot invited all the candidates to speak from a platform in the Albert Square. He was providing loud-speaking equipment and a microphone. This was the first time this had ever been used in a Dundee parliamentary election. All the candidates refused, except me, so Foot and I had the meeting to ourselves. I asked for the other candidates’ time but Dingle would not agree. The local newspapers estimated that there was an audience of 20,000 but my reckoning was nearer 30,000.
At first Foot tried to play it funny. He was no doubt put out at being the only candidate to appear with the Communist candidate, but he would know later that this did him a power of good.
He started by saying, “I hope that when Bob Stewart and his pals come to power and I am hanged they will let me choose my own lamp-post.”
I intervened to say, “Dingle is growing up a bit too fast, we will reserve the lamp-posts for the important people,” and that cut him down to size. I remember his concluding remarks that night.
He said, “Do you want a member of the Trades Union Congress or a Member of Parliament for Dundee? I want you to send me to Westminster not as a bondsman of the Trades Union Congress, or as a catspaw of Moscow, but as a member of the National Government.”
I wonder who he thinks serves the nation now?
The split in the labour movement and the slanderous campaign of the National candidates, in which the former right-wing Labour leaders, MacDonald, Snowden, Thomas and others, were the most vehement of all, was too much for the working-class forces to surmount.
If anyone still thinks that the labour movement is strengthened when the right-wing leaders abandon and rupture the movement in this way, they ought to read the history of the 1929-31 Labour government. Working-class political success rests on the ability of the labour movement to purge itself of the right-wing leaders by political exposure, before they can sell out and not after.
In the 1929 general election, the Labour Party had won 288 seats. In 1931 Labour won only 51 seats and had a net loss of 228.
The Dundee result showed Florence Horsbrugh to be the first Tory candidate to be returned for Dundee this century (she remained M.P. for Dundee until 1945). Dingle Foot was top of the poll, the result being:
D. Foot 52, 048
F. Horsbrugh 48, 556
M. Marcus 32, 573
E. Scrymgeour 32, 229
R. Stewart 10, 262
Dingle Foot was so delighted when Sheriff Morton declared the result that he called for three cheers for Stewart, Marcus and Scrymgeour. Smart fellow!
The second of two pictures of Anatole Kaminsky in his MI5 file.
Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky married Bob Stewart’s daughter Annie at some point during 1933. This is an overview of what I found in his security file when I visited the National Archives last year and any inaccuracies are my own. This post concerns information the British secret services gathered on him during his brief visits to Britain while the details of his arrest and execution can be found in ‘Comrades: Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky (Part One)’. Ultimately, this is all the information I have found out about Kaminsky but I would love to know more.
Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky first arrived in the United Kingdom on the 10th September 1930. Sailing from the Hook of Holland and docking at Harwich, it’s likely that it was his first visit or, at least, he had never caught the attention of the security services before. His arrival records state that he was 23 years old, a Russian national and that he carried a Soviet passport. His proposed address in the UK was given as “Arcos, London”. Arcos was the All-Russian Co-operative Society – the organisation which oversaw Anglo-Soviet trade. Three years before, its Hampstead headquarters had been raided by the British authorities and evidence of espionage uncovered. The whole affair had been a cause celebre and the relationship between Britain and the Soviet Union, always palpably frosty, had cooled somewhat as a consequence. Kaminsky came in on a six month visa and was employed as a commercial secretary. It’s clear from the outset that the security services were intending to keep an eye on him.
Initial investigations found that Kaminsky was much more than a secretary. In a letter dated 27th March 1930 Captain Guy Liddell, then of Special Branch, wrote to Oswald Allen Harker in MI5 with the following information:
Dear Harker,
Application was made a short time ago in Moscow for a visa for Anatole Naumovitch KAMINSKI, born 1907. This man who was then secretary of the Scientific Technical Section of the Society for the Promotion of Cultural Relations with Countries Abroad in Moscow, was coming here as a secretary to Arcos. Preliminary enquiries through SIS show that he is a scientist and is in touch with military scientific men in the “Revoyensoviet”. He has also been working in the Osoaviachim. He is a full member of the VKP (b).
KAMINSKI arrived her on the 10th September and proceeded to 81, Kensington Gardens Square, W.
The involvement with the Osoaviachim was of particular concern as that was the society concerned with the construction of military aircraft and chemical warfare research. There is little else in the file at this point other than establishing links with the director of Arcos Vladimir Belgoff and his wife Sophie. There was a request to intercept all mail at the Belgoff’s address 14 Tenterden Drive in Hendon and it looks like Kaminsky might have been staying with them for a time.
I assume Kaminsky left the UK sometime in March 1931 due to the length of his visa. However, he made a return visit in December of that year as part of The Trade Delegation of the USSR in Great Britain and, this time, he was listed as a “consulting economist”. Shortly after this on the 7th January 1932, he appeared in a news story in the Daily Mail. Despite the snideness of the journalist remarking on Kaminsky’s “broken English” the economist’s assurances that his activities are strictly business and nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence gathering are spectacularly unconvincing.
Transcript of The Daily Mail article from 1932 Anatole Kaminsky’s MI5 file.
ARCOS IMPUDENCE.
Demands to British Firms.
An impudent letter which British firms have received recently from Arcos is making them wonder what secret object the Soviet trade organisation in this country is pursuing under the disguise of innocent business relationships.
The letter explains that Arcos is anxious to “tabulate information on industrial and technical lines concerning their production and general characteristics of distinguished British firms, with whom we have commercial relations, to be placed upon record for reference when deciding orders for the forthcoming year.”
It proceeds: “We ask you especially to give technical information in detail such as measurements, size and capacity of machines.” It demands information “in detail” and not “under general headings” and instructs that replies should be sent “in triplicate.”
Then follows a questionnaire, half of which could be filled in from ordinary business books. It includes such questions as dividends paid, if any, from 1926 to 1931 and number of work people employed.
‘Comrade’ A. KAMINSKY, of the economic department of Arcos, is responsible for this piece of effrontery. He had little explanation to offer yesterday when asked by a Daily Mail reporter what was the object of this so-called business inquiry. “Just to assist us in making purchases,” he answered in broken English.
When it was suggested to him that the replies would be useful for the secret archives of Moscow, ‘Comrade’ KAMINSKY gave his favourite answer: “Oh, no, you make big mistake, just business purposes only.”
Kaminsky came to the attention of the security services again in January 1933 when he arrived in the UK on a short term visa only valid for a few months. It stated that he was returning to the same post, however, during this time, it was his personal life rather than the professional which interested MI5. It is likely that this was when he married Bob Stewart’s daughter Annie, my father’s Aunt Nan. There are several enquiries about this and it is confirmed by Superintendent Canning of Special Branch in May of that year.
“In reference to the enquiries which you were recently good enough to have made regarding Annie Walker STEWART (301/MP/2860), it has just been reported from a source which is I think reliable, that this woman is married to a Russian called KAMINSKY.”
Of course the security services were already interested in Bob Stewart for his roles in the covert finance of the CPGB, his time as the British representative to the Comintern and his associations in Ireland. They also clearly considered Annie and her older brothers William and Rab to be persons of interest due to their links to Arcos and it is likely that all three had some involvement, however slight, in Bob’s underground activities.
Although Annie’s marriage to a Soviet official who seemed to be rising through the ranks would have ensured the security services attention it seems the pair did little to attract it. The next mention of Kaminsky is from March 1934 when the passport office is extending his visa and its confirmed that, “This alien has not come under notice.”
Nevertheless, MI5 still tracked Kaminsky’s movements and gathered information on him. There’s a record that on March 4th 1934 there was a lecture at the “London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The lecturer was to be A. KAMINSKY, Soviet Economist, of the First Moscow State University, and the subject to be ‘The Second Five Year Plan.’” Also that year MI5 received intelligence that Kaminsky was “the real power behind Arcos” and that he was “either married to or living with Nan STUART, the daughter of the Clydeside Communist.” One hopes the agent who drafted that memo was slightly more knowledgeable about potential threats to the nation than they were about Scottish geography. Bob was a Dundonian – not a Glaswegian. It’s likely they were confusing Bob with Willie Gallacher.
By October 1935, Anatole and Annie had moved to Moscow although they were in regular contact with the family back in London. Being so far away Annie would have been eager for news from home and, in the files, there is an intercepted letter from Bob dated the 8th October. The security services were mostly interested in the references to Harry Pollitt, the head of the CPGB and his wife Marjorie. However, the letter is largely domestic. Bob’s wife Margaret is ‘in the tub’ and Bob is taking the opportunity to write to their daughter. There is some news of ‘Bill and family’ – my grandfather, grandmother and my dad – baby Robin- who would have been two years old at the time. There’s some gossip about Rab, Bob’s middle child and his new girlfriend. The anecdote about them singing makes me smile as when I met his daughter Linda for the first time last year she remarked that what her father loved above all else was music. Towards the end there’s some talk of knitting and this is because Annie would have been pregnant at the time with my father’s cousin Greg. Bob and Margaret were eagerly awaiting their second grandchild.
Part of the letter from Bob Stewart to Annie and Anatole. (1935).
Dear N & N again,
Your letter arrived a couple of hours ago and we three enjoyed its contents. So very glad to know that you are both so well. This seems to be washing night. Rab balked and hopped off to bed, mother is now in the tub. While the old man, like the dutiful father he is, sits down to write this letter straight away lest tomorrow he should be too busy in other directions. The new situation is imposing duties that cannot wait as you will readily appreciate. We are well in health. Rab walks fairly comfortably now and is on the hunt for a job. Mother is all right again and of course the old man is the XXXX-XXXX-XXXX or thereby.
We were glad that you remembered our Welsh friends who are really the most excellent comrades. I hope you will be successful in helping them out. Very glad that P____ is going to help you get numbers? Tolia has many things to do and maybe he is modest about his own comfort. We were so glad to get his picture cards from way down South to find that his writing arm was still in good order. I gave Harry your message- he says it’s between you and Marjorie whom I saw a day or two ago. She is looking and feeling very well as is Jean who played merry hell when I couldn’t play with her any longer. We have not seen Bill and family for a fortnight but they are all well and Robin has had more photographs taken. Everyone likes to take his picture and he quite likes it. We have now got a big one of him and all the lady visitors are taking him for a walk -he is so lovely to look at they say.
We have had numbers of visitors recently among them XXXX’s auntie who is much interested in you but more in Rab who needs to help with the printers of whom we have now quite a few. We had Tom Wilson and C____ up for tea and we had a young girlfriend from a distance staying the weekend. She and Rab sang all our favourites till the wee sma’ oors. It was delightful. She reminded mother very much of you although her singing was a vast improvement on yours. She went away home overwhelmed by the kindness of your mother which is not unusual. We also had a visit from one of the numerous Clark family who want me to share with you the joys of the children’s movement at home. I don’t remember his first name he’s got a job in some club or hotel down Leatherhead way – not much of a job but better than idleness. Yes! We read in your XXXX all about the XXXX expansion of trade and the XXXX values brings to you all. It’s a remarkable achievement and opens the door to new XXXX. It’s a consolidation of brilliance compared to the darkening skies elsewhere. The centre the world’s attention is now on Africa and as you’ll see by the British XXXX there is a lack of confusion and in some cases XXXX XXXX in our movement. It’s an acid test that will reveal much base metal. Probably you will have seen Jane ‘ere you get this. I hope she will benefit from her sojourn in your country. Hope to get some of your orders shipped in the course of the next fortnight if I’m not called away! I notice the knitting needles being used here and no doubt you’ll be pleased with the result – the other fittings may not be so easy to get but will have a good try on the first fine day. I think that’s all I’ve got to say at this time except that the weather is as wet as you have had it. Even as we are all bearing up – always cheered up when your letters come along. All the same I could have sat in on mothers celebration and I think Rab’s teeth were watering when I thought of what he could have done had he been around. I don’t know if I told you that Jimmy B had a XXXX XXXX badly and has been under medical care for three weeks. He seems to have got over the worst but it is a XXXX XXXX blow as he had to cancel all engagements and new ones will not be easy to get. Cheerio- it’s bedtime.
Love from all to you all,
Dad.
(I’ve used XXXX when I can’t make out the Bob’s handwriting.)
Greg was born in Moscow in early 1936 and, in the summer, Annie took him to London so that everyone could be introduced to the latest addition to the family. Anatole stayed behind in the Soviet Union but wrote regularly. MI5 intercepted the following letter from him addressed to Annie and their son. The letter has all the hallmarks of the new parent – concern, pride and love. However, just over a year later Anatole’s brother, Grigory, was arrested and executed in Stalin’s purges, setting in motion his own imprisonment and eventual murder.
Letter from Anatole Kaminsky to Annie Stewart. (1936).
17th June 1936
Dearest Nan and XXXX
Last night I received your long letter and felt very happy that you are managing well. It was nice to hear that calm and sunny weather made your journey bright and not a difficult one.
A few days ago I got your note from the sea and Dad’s ‘epistle’. It makes a pleasant reading to find out that old people and the whole family are taking such a keen interest in our wee sonny. I think he already succeeded to prove that he is a thoroughly good boy and deserves all the love and care bestowed upon him. As to his ??? on the face I think it will go away after some fresh fruit and vegetable diet of his milking cow – (Sorry to use zoo terms!)
Have a complete rest, change over to fruit eats and drinks and don’t take troubles of any kind. I don’t give anymore advice is as you have very good advisers around you with lots of experience gained during a long life. The only remark will be the main thing is to develop regular habits a good regime.
Anatole
According to his file, Anatole made one more visit to the United Kingdom. Beforehand, the Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky wrote to the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to request a visa so Kaminsky could attend trade negotiations.
M. Maisky, Ambassador of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Great Britain, presents his compliments to His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and has the honour to request a visa for M. Anatole Kaminsky who is a financial expert, and is coming to this country to take part in the financial negotiations which are going on between the Trade Representative of the USSR in London and the Board of Trade.
As his presence here is urgently required, M. Maisky would be obliged if the instructions granting him a visa could be telegraphed to Moscow at the Embassy’s expense.
11th of July, 1936.
The Rt. Hon. Anthony Eden, MC, MP,
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky arrived in Britain from Amsterdam by aeroplane on or around the 1st August 1936 and was recorded as an “Economic Advisor to the USSR Trade Delegation.” An unconditional landing was granted. This is the last record I can find of Kaminsky in the MI5 files until 1956 when, after Khruschev’s speech denouncing Stalin, Annie and her teenage son, Greg found out exactly what had happened to him after his arrest by the NKVD in June 1938.
Breaking the Fetters 