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.
Peter Kerrigan
Breaking the Fetters 