Tag: Communist

Winston Churchill and the Evils of Drink

Despite Bob Stewart – the communist spy being a background presence throughout my life I never once took my copy of his autobiography ‘Breaking the Fetters’ off the shelf and read it until my mid forties during the first COVID-19 lockdown. To be honest I’d been reluctant to tackle it for a long time fearing an unreadable droning of a stern and unrepentant Marxist-Leninist full of words and phrases that I still don’t fully understand like ‘surplus value’ and ‘commodity fetishism’. I’d imagined the kind of person who, just at the point when everyone wants to leave a three hour meeting, starts bringing up endless points of order while everyone else coughs and sighs while dying inside. It was a surprise and a relief to find that spending a few hours with him, through the years, through his printed words was, by and large, a joy. I found someone with a deep sense of justice, of compassion and who possessed a sense of humour as dry as the bar at the temperance movement’s Victory Lodge. 

A highlight was Bob’s encounter with Winston Churchill early on in the future Prime Minister’s career. Surreally, so many years after his death, Churchill looms larger in our national consciousness now than at any other point in my lifetime. Towering historical figure he may be but he’s now revered in a way he simply wasn’t in his own time. The heavy jowelled, bulldog appearance synonymous with British grit and determination in the face of the enemy to those convinced they fought them on the beaches even though they were born in 1963 and the closest they’ve got to combat was watching ‘The Dambusters’ endlessly just because you can’t say the dog’s name these days. Voice any slight criticism of the Harrow and Sandhurst alumni and his conduct regarding Gallipoli, or striking miners in Tonypandy or famine in Bengal is tantamount to treason. There’s a whole generation of people out there who believe that the scene in ‘Darkest Hour’ where Gary Oldman in bald cap and fat suit is riding on the London Underground and a representative cross section of the population travelling with him offer him their unanimous wholehearted emotional support is literally true. But it wasn’t like that. It never is. Whole nations rarely take serving politicians to their hearts- they cause too much damage on the way. Watch the footage of crowds at Walthamstow Stadium booing the great man while canvassing for votes in the general election that followed our victory in the Second World War. Look at how decisively the electorate booted him out that year. Churchill on the 5th of July 1945 represented a return to the old way of life and he was comprehensively rejected.

Whatever your views on him however, there is one pillar of Winston’s appeal that is ingrained into the British psyche– his herculean capacity and tolerance for the grape and the grain. He was, by all accounts, a sot. One of the greatest drinkers of the twentieth century. If you locked Oliver Reed, Peter O’Toole, Richards Burton and Harris and, oh, let’s say Dylan ‘Drink Canada Dry’ Thomas together with the nation’s favourite Prime Minister in the Coach and Horses overnight I know which one would I would bet on being the last one standing when the owner came to open up in the morning. It wouldn’t be the actors and it wouldn’t be the poet. Churchill would still be there pouring himself a whiskey mouthwash and ignoring the smoking ban. So, when my great grandfather met Churchill for the first time in 1908 they were not only political opposites– the one being an advocate for the cause of the working class, the other a patrician born into the highest levels of the aristocracy- they were divided on what Bob considered the most moral question of the time – the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. The temperance movement had got Bob early and it was the damage that drink caused in working class communities that most concerned him.

Bob had recently returned from South Africa and his miserable experiences in Pretoria and Cape Town cemented his wish to fight the exploitation of ordinary working people and so he decided to go into politics full time. Up to this point he writes that his life had, “consisted of finding a job, trying to keep it, trade union work, organising in the temperance movement, speaking and debating on radical platforms and reading and trying to assimilate the new revolutionary socialist ideas.” The polar opposite of the life of an aristocratic, high Tory grandee such as Churchill. Bob became a full-time organiser for the Scottish Prohibition Party and in 1908 he was elected to Dundee Town Council where he worked to alleviate the effects of endemic unemployment and hunger through organising soup kitchens, food donations and tree planting schemes to provide much needed work. Around this time Winston Churchill, eight years into his Parliamentary career and enjoying an opportunistic dalliance with Asquith’s Liberal Party found himself having to contest a by-election in Dundee. This was occasioned by him having been promoted to the cabinet by being appointed President of the Board of Trade and this required him, due to the regulations of the period, to face the electorate again in his constituency of North West Manchester. Embarrassingly, he lost to the Tory candidate. At this point, he was parachuted in to contest a seat in Dundee. For Churchill the stakes were high – if he didn’t win then his future in politics was in doubt. Young Winston threw himself into his campaigning with his customary energy but Bob, working as election agent for the Prohibition Party candidate couldn’t help but notice “the gulf between Churchill’s oratory and the living reality” on the streets where meetings were held. While in a packed Drill Hall Churchill declared, “Britain has great imperial strength. We have belted the world with free institutions!” my great grandfather pointed to the Sherriff Court next door, the salvation Army Home for fallen women across the street, the Parish Council Lunatic Department next to that and the nearby Curr Night Refuge for homeless people. Tick off any of Beveridge’s five great evils – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness – it was as unlikely then as now that any tory in a liberal disguise would throw a life belt or offer so much as a sticking plaster to those in suffering. Let alone the institutions of empire. That said, and true to the eternal frustration of the left whereby the proletariat inevitably vote against their own bloody interests, Churchill romped home with a comfortable majority. “How do you think it’s going?” he asked Bob at the count. “You’re in by a mile, worse luck,” was my ancestor’s reply.

Nevertheless, earlier on that evening – with his future in the balance – Churchill was agitated. Bob noticed him alone twisting little rubber bands around his fingers until they snapped and pacing the floor. Seizing the opportunity of the seasoned temperance campaigner he struck up a conversation with him while the Liberal votes started to pile up and the aristocrat’s cabinet position was increasingly secured. What concerned Bob most would be what his opponent would do in Parliament to bring the banning of the sale of strong drink into law. Eventually the Lord Provost sidled up to the veteran temperance campaigner and remarked, “I understand you’ve been trying to convert Winnie to prohibition. By Christ! Bob, you never give up!” In his memoir Bob, laconically observes:

“He said it in a voice of admiration for my courage and with the certainty that I was on a forlorn quest. As later years proved, Churchill and the prohibition of strong drink were poles apart.”

The understatement in that last sentence serves as an elegant example of his humour. Bob looked on as the electorate hoisted Churchill onto their shoulders at the moment of victory and then deposited him in is automobile outside and then proceeded to carry him- in his car – down the street. No doubt much strong drink was taken that night. However, this anecdote also highlights one of the problems of those in the temperance movement. That of separateness, of being apart. Your concern for the less fortunate making you holier than thou. Bob found it hard to understand the pleasures drink can bring – the release, the freedom, the escape.  At one level it shows an inability to understand the people you’re supposed to be representing – clearly the path the Communist Party of Great Britain was on when Bob was writing his memoirs in the mid-sixties. However, by the time Bob was heading into his forties he wasn’t yet a communist, nor did the organization that he would dedicate the rest of his life to exist. It would take the First World War to bring that about.

Alan Stewart.

Communist Curriculum Vitae

The document above is taken from the MI5 files now held at the National Archives in Kew. It’s from 1957 and gives a pretty comprehensive overview of Bob Stewart’s career in the Communist Party so far. Bob celebrated his eightieth birthday that year and most of the material the security services picked up from tapped telephones and bugged offices at the CPGB HQ in King Street, Covent Garden relate to him aiming to wind down and retire. There’s a decent summary of his professional life at the end.

“A long and active Party record as both British member and as agent for the Comintern. Knows probably more than any other living Party member of undercover activity and covert finance with which he has been concerned throughout his career.”

He’d spent quite a lot of the early years in Moscow, attended Lenin’s funeral and sat in meetings with Stalin. Then he spent time in Ireland trying to start up a Communist Party with the Irish labour hero Jim Larkin but little came of it. At one time, while the rest of the leading British communists were thrown in jail around the time of the General Strike, he became the CPGB’s Acting General Secretary. The Second World War years are a bit of a mystery but by the mid fifties the old man was very much on the security services radar again, though in this run down of activities they miss out his recent visit to China with Harry Pollitt where he met Mao Zedong.

Most of the surveillance work over the immediate years previously had been spent tailing him as he routinely visited satellite embassies and various address in the south of England. This was largely thought to be Bob moving different sums of Moscow cash around in order to keep King Street and The Daily Worker going. The issue of retiring and who he should hand over his responsibilities to was problematic as Bob wrote very little down, preferring instead to keep the details of all his undercover work in his head. There are several times in the transcripts where he is overheard by MI5 that he has been very lucky so far and didn’t want to go to prison at this time of his life. Indeed, at his advanced age he felt his memory was starting to fail and the past year had been exhausting. Revelations of Stalin’s crimes and how it affected his family personally had taken their toll. Eventually, Reuben Falber took over Bob’s work and if you want to find out what happened to the ‘Moscow gold’ just type his name into Google.

I don’t think Bob fully retired. There’s an album of photos from the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961 showing him mingling energetically with the delegates. He published his memoirs, Breaking the Fetters when he was ninety. Sensibly, but frustratingly it contains nothing of his undercover activities and only covers the early period of his life and the Party so there is little reflection on Stalinism. However, what does come through is his tremendous energy. The Communist Party in Britain formed in 1920. Bob was forty-five years old.  All of this happened in the last half of his life. Before, there’d been thirty odd years of campaigning for the temperance movement, for trade unionism and against the First World War. The drive he had astonishes me.

Alan Stewart.

What Is to Be Done?

I came to this story through grief. In 2018 my father, Michael, suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of 84. His passing brought to an end years of decline through vascular dementia. I had loved him very much and the idea that now there was only myself, my elder brother Ian and our mother was impossible to process. We did what most families do in that first year – come together for solace, then fracture painfully, then slowly heal. We did most of our grieving separately but I imagine it looked pretty similar. Sleep never seemed to arrive and I spent many nights in the spare room as my partner slept on searching through photographs, old letters and hunting down any recording or videos just so I could hear his voice again. He left very little trace on the internet – I picked up a few extra photographs from his days as a parish councillor, the odd story archived from the local paper from his days as the landlord of the village pub but very little else. Although it was in no way a reality, I felt I was losing him just as surely as the dementia had whittled down his ability to tell the stories he loved. God knows why I was looking for proof that he existed but, as is the way with these things, the death of a parent leads you to wanting to know more about where you come from and who your family are. And inevitably, you always leave it too late to ask the questions you need to ask. The gathering at my father’s funeral had been small. That’s not surprising for someone of my father’s age. He’d not been wealthy, he’d been an only child, both his parents had been dead for decades and illness had reduced his world. I’d always been aware that my family was perhaps more compact than my friends’ with all their cousins and uncles and aunts but, on my dad’s side, despite there being family out there somewhere, I can’t remember very much contact while I was growing up. Other than the affection he held for Bill and Jessica, his mother and father, and a few stories about his grandfather Bob I knew very little about his life before he was our Dad.

One insomniac night I was looking for more traces of him, and I finally found something more. I’d searched the National Archives collection and discovered the security service files relating to ‘Robert Stewart: A founder member of the British Communist Party…British representative on the Comintern and a member of its Executive. For many years he oversaw the British Communist Party’s secret apparatus including, it was thought, those of its members who passed military information to the Soviet Union’.  Of course I’d grown up with the knowledge of who Bob Stewart was but here was acres of material – all scanned and, from what was once top secret, easily accessible. Skimming through one file I found this dated August 1933:

“I saw Bob Stewart yesterday. Bill’s wife is in hospital. She had a baby a couple of days ago. Bob didn’t know a thing until it arrived. Both are doing well.”

The extract was from a letter intercepted by MI5 and written by the union agitator and one of the few communist politicians to be elected to Parliament, Willie Gallacher. The baby was my father who was born a few weeks before. The letter is mentioned during some notes about Bob’s arrival from Holland. Not only is his correspondence and that of his friends being intercepted, his movement around the country and abroad are being closely monitored. I continued to search the files for any mention of my father, occasionally rewarded with a tantalising glimpse. By the time the surveillance crept into the 1950s they were bugging telephones and offices. Through the transcripts I had the intimate conversations of the side of the family I had vaguely heard about but never really knew.

So, what is to be done with all of this? And all the letters, photographs and souvenirs left behind that we inherited from Granddad after his death in 1978. The case full of stuff that convinced me that all my family were all Soviet agents when I was five. The answer is to read and remember and to try to understand. There’s a lot in Bob’s life that I admire but, as with any lifelong communist from the 1920s, sooner or later you have to confront the obscenity of Stalinism. At the moment, as I’m researching the ramifications of Khrushchev’s secret speech and the Hungarian uprising in 1956 its clear these events had huge repercussions for my great grandfather, his children and his grandchildren. I’m not sure Bob comes out of it well but that’s for later. For now, all that remains is to say – Dad, all this is for you. I wish you were here to show you what we’ve found out. I wish you were here to talk about it all. We miss you.

Alan Stewart.