Long before I got caught up in my family’s communist past I was an East Anglian small town goth obsessed with The Sisters of Mercy. In 1987, at the age of fourteen, I begged my dad to let me go and see Ghost Dance, the band formed by Sisters co-founder Gary Marx at Lowestoft Pier. Alas, he thought I was too young and it was two years until I was allowed to go to my first gig (Fields of the Nephilim at UEA in 1989- they were ace!)
Anyway, Marx has been fairly low profile since the demise of Ghost Dance in the late 1980s. He was always my favourite member of the Sisters because he looked so fucking cool and, as so many years have passed, I thought I’d never see him. Until tonight. Gary Marx is playing and telling all.
I’m in Old Woollen in Farsley watching the heartwarming scenes of old faces from the 1980s Leeds goth scene greet each other while I nurse a pint on my own as I was unwilling to subject my partner to a level of detail about the early years of The Sisters of Mercy that I thought she couldn’t cope with. I admit I was wrong. I’ve spotted the parent of one of my son’s childhood friends in tow with his kid who’s now the age when I was most in thrall to the Sisters. The guy used to do their merch. I’ve already texted my kid to say it’s as if I dragged him along to a CPGB meeting. The show’s about to start so I’ll hold off for a while.
…………….
OK! He started with Anaconda, played the Damage Done and Adrenochrome, Burn was on there and the last song was Heartland- my favourite Sisters song of all time. The anecdotes were funny and he was an engaging performer. So why am I telling you all this?
They’re on the left. They’ve always been on the left. Since the days where their drum machine sounded like, as Jon Langford described, “a mouse tap dancing.” They came from a scene that included Gang of Four and The Mekons and, although they’re not explicitly political they’re actually consumed by politics. I wasn’t old enough to see the original version of the band but I’ve seen most incarnations and I’m heartened that they are defiantly supportive of their current non binary guitarist. Gary Marx is actually Mark Pearman, a pseudonym for the DHSS but to be honest all of that doesn’t matter right now.
I had the best time tonight.
Alan Stewart.
Postscript. Sunday evening. Countryfile’s on.
If the above post doesn’t make much sense it’s because I was slightly tipsy (understatement) when I wrote it. Now leaning into my hangover…
I thought I’d post some things that I’ve previously shared on Twitter/X. First of all here’s a set of photographs I found detailing Bob’s visit to China. It’s a particularly resonant event for me due to the ornamental walking stick which was presented to him when he met Mao Zedong. When my brother and I were children we were fascinated by it as it was beautifully inscribed with intricate black and red Chinese script. Dad told us these were quotes from Mao’s little red book; he mentioned some stuff about paper tigers and gun barrels but I didn’t really understand. Ian and I used to pretend it was a guitar to mime along to Beatles records with until, inevitably, the writing was completely worn away. Yet another significant historical artefact that didn’t survive intact. As he entered his last decade it became my dad’s walking stick. Now it’s leaning by my front door waiting for the time when it will be mine.
The first photograph is quite well known as it’s reproduced in Bob’s memoirs. He shown smiling and laughing with Chairman Mao. This one usually produces a “WTF?!” when I show it to friends.
Bob, his friend and General Secretary of the CPGB, Harry Pollitt and a Chinese official – if anyone out there recognises any of these people please let me know – I’ll be writing the chapter that includes this visit in a month or so.
Bob and Harry view a parade in Tiananmen Square.
I don’t know anything about this photo but it’s amazing.
And to finish, a transcript of Bob boasting about what he smuggled through customs on his return courtesy of the bug MI5 placed at CPGB HQ.
Notes from Anthony Blunt’s confession in 1964 where he mentions Bob Stewart’s role in the network.
On Tuesday I received a late Christmas present courtesy of The National Archives – a selection of previously secret MI5 files were made available to the public for the first time. This latest release of material is largely concerned with the Cambridge Five. There’s acres of material on Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross as well as Philby’s first wife Litzi Friedmann. It couldn’t more opportune time as I’m currently attempting to write the first draft of the 1940s chapter in my biography of Bob Stewart.
I’ve known about Bob’s involvement with the Cambridge Five since I was a teenager in the 1980s; it was mentioned in Peter Wright’s Spycatcher. It’s been further outlined by security expert Nigel West who states in The Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence that, “in the absence of [their Soviet contact] Anatoli Gorsky in 1940, Stewart had run Blunt, Kim Philby, and Guy Burgess.”
Although it’s a minor part of the book I’m writing, I recognise that people are still fascinated by the Cambridge spies. I’m fascinated too. Recently, I loved the TV adaptation of Ben MacIntyre’s A Spy Amongst Friends which sent me rushing to the book; I recently finished the excellent Guy Burgess biography Stalin’s Englishman by Andrew Lownie (Burgess has always been my favourite since Alan Bates in An Englishman Abroad) and I’m currently rereading Enemies Within by Richard Davenport-Hines which argues that the whole affair shaped modern Britain. It’s always blown my mind that my great grandfather was involved. I’ve been trying to write about it for a while now but, as so much of the detail is, well, secret, I’ve found it very hard going. I am so relieved all this material is now easy to access. I had a quick scan through some files the other night and here’s a few things that I found.
Bob’s involvement was first revealed when Anthony Blunt confessed in 1964. After this MI5 renewed their interest in Litzi Friedmann and, in one of the documents in her file, you get a fuller exploration of her and Bob’s roles,
Also in Litzi’s file is the transcript of a lengthy interview in 1968 with Edith Tudor-Hart her friend and the woman who helped recruit Kim Philby as a penetration agent for the Soviets. I love her evasiveness in this passage.
Tudor-Hart’s interview was in 1968 as Blunt spent the years following his confession in endless debriefs with MI5. Here’s more information from one of those sessions.
So far all of this simply adds a bit more detail to what we already know. If I’m lucky there’ll be a bit more buried somewhere in this latest release although it might take a while to uncover it in the thousands of documents. In particular I’m hoping to uncover Peter Wright’s interview with Bob that he alludes to in Spycatcher. I’ll never uncover the whole story though. I’d need to visit Russia and gain access to the archives there. Given the world situation and the state of my finances there’s two hopes of that. Appropriately enough, one of those hopes is called ‘Bob.’
Alan Stewart.
The latest release of MI5 files by The National Archives is available here:
I can’t let the year end without posting something about my favourite book published this year – Maurice Casey’s ‘Hotel Lux’. I’ve no time to write a proper review so these hastily written words will have to do…
One of the least edifying aspects of being a socialist is the tendency of some comrades always having to prove to those present that they are the most left wing person in the room. Last week I achieved this enviable position with practically no effort on my part at all. And me being only slightly to the left of Ed Miliband. The occasion was the presentation of the Biographer’s Club Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize for best proposal for a first time biographer for which I was nominated for my Bob Stewart book. I didn’t win but it was fantastic to be in the running. The event was held at Albany, a large Georgian apartment block in the heart of London’s Piccadilly, the previous residents of which include Wordsworth, Byron and Gladstone.
It’s an exclusive address. Apartments or ‘sets’ rarely become available for sale and, when the occasion arises, you would need to have several million and be able to convince the residents’ association that you were just the right kind of person to have as a neighbour. Families tend to put their names down for a place a few generations before they secure one. As a child of the lower middle classes I was somewhat out of my depth in these surroundings. My hosts could not be faulted, however. My partner and I were made very welcome, wine flowed and I spent the evening chatting to other guests about our biographical obsessions.
The subject of my own work did occasion several wary enquiries as to whether I was a communist myself. It was if they were worried that I was about to requisition the property on behalf of the proletariat or collectivise their Hampshire estates. I reassured anyone who asked that there hadn’t been a Marxist-Leninist in the family since my grandfather died in 1978. Most of the guests were placated but one elderly gentleman in and immaculate Prince of Wales check jacket and a rather fetching bow tie muttered to me, “Communism is a virus!”
I bridled a little at first, taking it personally, a potential family insult, before we both steered the conversation away from the controversial. Encounters such as this do reflect one of the dilemmas of this project. Getting to know my ancestors has been a privilege, I find so much to admire and to celebrate. However, though their beliefs were shaken in 1956, they were staunch defenders of Stalin. This is a hard pill to swallow. I can understand, even when I don’t share it, this gentleman’s reaction. When I began my research this inheritance seemed far too huge for me to do it any justice. The best commentary I’ve read on it has been in ‘Hotel Lux.’
The book’s main focus is the relationship between three revolutionary women who came to Moscow and stayed at the Comintern’s preferred lodgings in the early twentieth century. It’s an immersive read full of fascinating detail. Woven through the narrative are the author’s reflections on being part of the radical left tradition and how one should deal with the ramifications of Stalinism. Early on in his research in Moscow, Casey is asked by a University professor, “So, are you for the Romanovs or the Bolsheviks?” The author fumbles his answer and wishes he could have given the more considered response he came up with after the event.
“The Soviet experiment inaugurated by the Bolsheviks was the culmination of many projects for revolutionary emancipation that arose in 19th century Europe. For better or worse, I consider all those emancipatory projects a part of my political ancestry. This is a messy inheritance, one that includes revolutionaries embracing one another in enthusiasm for a shared dream and former comrades sentencing one another to death in service to their cause. At the most basic level, the Romanovs did not want the world that I and others like myself desire. The Bolsheviks sought what I seek: equality. Therefore, when presented with this choice and within this context, I am for the Bolsheviks.“
This theme is developed during his research when he comes across that rare but not rare enough figure, a modern day admirer of Stalin.
“For two weeks, I made my way through the Comintern’s personnel files, folders where personal material relating to comrades and enemies of international communism was collated. I struck up an acquaintance with another English speaking researcher who regularly visited Moscow to work with Stalin-era materials. This researcher, I learned over coffee breaks, supported a resolutely hard-line form of communism. This gradually became clear over coffee- break discussions of our research topics. ‘Stalin was a man of great depth,’ he told me as I sat, disconcerted, before a disappointing cappuccino.
With one part of my mind thinking over the steel Memorial plaques I constantly saw on the walls of Moscow residential block, our conversation turned to 1937 and the Great Terror. For those who saw communism as a dead idea, it was not merely the Great Terror but one of the many inevitable red terrors. Violent oppression was, according to this theory, the unavoidable outgrowth of left wing ideas. They could not be fulfilled without it: radical levelling required violent purging. Such determinist readings, including those made by proponents of a teleological Marxism, always seemed unconvincing to me through their wilful blindness to the extraordinary range of possibilities that exist in the past. In our conversation, my coffee break companion appeared to share with the anti-communists a belief in the inevitability of terror. He differed only in his approach to its desirability. He upheld the orthodox communist line: yes, mistakes were made, but the terror was ultimately necessary to defend socialism: counter-revolution needed to be met with all-encompassing violence
This interpretation of the terror, one I’ve encountered occasionally in left wing circles seemed to render socialism a cruel idea. Yet I needed to confront how many of those I wrote about and researched people whose lives seemed to me so full of sympathetic moments accepted similarly cold logic. Before coming to Moscow I found it easier to see my people as those who courageously faced the firing squads without renouncing their ideals but now I could see more clearly that our political ancestry is never so neat. This was an admission that I tried to keep central in my mind once I returned to my work. I continued passing through fragments from a time when other paths seemed open, when dreams were not yet vanquished. I was learning to become more comfortable with murky moral complexity of revolutionary lives.“
Similar reflections are woven into the narrative as the book progresses and the protagonists and their families are affected in different ways by Stalinism. It’s an incredible piece of work and I’d encourage anyone to grab themselves a copy as soon as possible. If you’ve already read it buy it for friends and family for Christmas. It’s been invaluable to me as I contemplate the “murky moral complexity of revolutionary lives” of my own family.
Extract from Bob Stewart’s memoirs Breaking the Fetters from which the title of my biography is taken.
I’ve not posted much on here lately and so before 2024 draws to a close I’d like to update you on what’s happening with the project. The reason for the lack of new articles is that I’ve been concentrating on finishing the biography I’m writing of Bob Stewart. It is tentatively titled Everything You Get Must Be Fought For and it’s about three quarters finished. Frustratingly, it has sometimes seemed that this is the book’s permanent state as work commitments get in the way but it will be finished. I’ m just wise enough now not to confidently say when that will be.
Back in January I handed my work in progress to Stu Hennigan, the author of Ghost Signs: Poverty and the Pandemic and his editing and advice was invaluable. Following his suggestions during redrafting has improved the book beyond measure and I’m very excited by the results. It might turn out that Everything You Get… will be something people will actually want to hold in their hands. If you haven’t read Stu’s book yet I urge you to do so as soon as possible – its an essential exploration of our recent history. I also can’t recommend his editing enough – sympathetically forthright is possibly the best description I can offer. I think he’s currently swamped with work and deadlines for his own writing at the moment but if, in the future, he announces he’s ready to take on more editing assignments I’d encourage any author to seize the opportunity of working with him. You can find him easily on Bluesky now that Twitter/X becomes a less attractive option with every passing day.
Early this autumn I entered the Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize. This is run by the Biographer’s Club and awards £2,000 to the best proposal for an uncommissioned first biography. Since then I’ve had little time to write and I’ve hit a patch where I’m stuck. I’m finding the 1940s very difficult to navigate and I’ve been pretty fed up with the whole thing. I had assumed that my proposal had got nowhere but yesterday, to my amazement, I received an email telling me that I had been shortlisted and the prize will be announced on the 11th December. I am overjoyed at this unexpected development – it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. It’s all very exciting and I’m looking forward to the announcement. I am in some very good company. The details of the prize and the other shortlisted titles can be found here: https://thebiographersclub.com/elizabeth-buccleuch-prize-2024-shortlist-announced/
Before Christmas I hope to post a couple of new articles. First of all a few words on Hotel Lux by Maurice J Casey which is my favourite book released this year. I would be very pleased if mine were half as good when it’s finished. Also, I hope to do a Comrades post on Bob’s daughter Annie Walker Stewart or Nan as she was better known. There’s a magnificent newspaper story from the 1920s which features her as precocious young revolutionary which I’ve shared before on Twitter but which needs to be on the site.
Anyway, that’s it for now except to say thank you to everyone who has been so generous in helping me either in person or online. Keep your fingers crossed for me at the Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize announcement on the 11th of December!
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.
Breaking the Fetters 