Winston Churchill – Breaking the Fetters

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 18: Winston Churchill Takes a Beating.

A little over a year had passed since the Communist Party’s first parliamentary contest at Caerphilly when it had to face its first general election. Parliament was dissolved in October 1922 and the election was on. We were fighting for united political action with the Labour Party, and at the general election we came out strongly for electoral unity. In five constituencies our members contested with Labour support: Saklatvala for Battersea North, Geddes for Greenock, Windsor for Bethnal Green N.E., Vaughan for Bethnal Green S.W. and Walton Newbold at Motherwell. At Dundee Bill Gallacher contested because it was a two-seat constituency and there was only one Labour candidate.

Because of my knowledge of Dundee and its politics I was sent along with Harry Pollitt to assist Gallacher. In 1908 I had been election agent to Scrymgeour, when Churchill had been elected with great enthusiasm. Now I was back in 1922 to see him rejected with equal enthusiasm.

Gallacher arrived in Dundee on a Saturday evening. In fact he left an all-night sitting of the Party’s National Executive to travel from London on the day train. We had arranged a welcoming party for him which was more successful than we had ever hoped; at the Tay Bridge Station there were nearly 10,000 people gathered, along with the Engineers’ pipe band. At the station we formed a procession; the band, then Gallacher and the election agent, Jimmy Gardner (who later became general secretary of the Foundry Workers’ Union), then the thousands streaming behind. We marched through the town singing “Vote, Vote, Vote for Willie Gallacher!” and finished up in the Albert Square where we held the first meeting of the campaign.

That Dundee election campaign was a rowdy, tousy, all action affair. there were six candidates for two seats, but the main protagonists were Gallacher and Churchill. In every speech Willie went after Churchill and his government, and in his speeches Churchill slanged Russia, the Communists and Gallacher in particular. As the campaign progressed the Gallacher and Churchill meetings were packed to capacity with hundreds in overflows and Churchill invariably getting the bird.

Winston Churchill’s campaign material for the 1922 election. In the words of The Ramones, “Glad to se ya go, go, go, go! Goodbye!”

Gallacher’s campaign was wonderfully organised and could serve as a lesson to many present day parliamentary candidates. It was in this election I first saw the effective use of the propaganda tactic of the short street meeeting. Jimmy Shand came up from Salford with his car – the same one we had at Caerphilly – to help Gallacher. Willie got a megaphone – no loudspeakers in those days- and, with Jimmy Shand driving, they toured the shopping centres and streets holding short quarter of an hour meetings and then moving on. In these days meetings were held at selected points at advertised times and Gallacher’s car and megaphone meetings were ‘with it’ political campaigning that none of the other candidates, not even Churchill, could match and were one of the reasons why Gallacher was the best known candidate.

Because of his powerful personality and forceful campaigning, Gallacher attracted many non-communists to support him. We had hundreds of very able people on election work, but our real campaigning punch was provided by our chalking team. They were experts and did a real artistic job. Right down the middle of all the Dundee tramlines, spaced every fifty yards, was a Gallacher slogan- not all political- such as , “Don’t be silly, vote for Willie” or “Willie for Dundee”. No one had to ask who Willie was. These slogans were brushed on with a solution of carbide and whitewash and withstood all weathers for many months.

Towards the end of the campaign Churchill suffered a second body blow. It was bad enough Willie kicking hell out of him in every speech, but his one-time pal, the Dundee press autocrat D. C. Thomson, also took a hand. Churchill had asked the Dundee Courier (D. C. Thomson’s morning news-paper) to publish an advertisement giving quotations from speeches from Austen Chamberlain and Bonar Law, of course supporting the Churchill point of view, but Thomson refused to accept the advertisement. No doubt Churchill’s ego was offended; anyway there followed a real slanging match between old David Thomson and Churchill in correspondence which lasted right up to polling day, when the whole correspondence was published verbatim in the D. C. Thomson press as the voters were going to the poll. On the day polling took place the Dundee Courier published a leading article which commenced as follows:

CHURCHILL WITH HIS CHOLER UP

The Tale of a Lost Temper

Whatever may be his chances at the poll today, there can be no doubt that Winston Churchill is in a vile temper. He has taken no pains to conceal the fact. For those within his reach he has buckets of calumny . . . Mr. Pilkington, Mr. Morel, Mr. Scrymgeour, and Mr. Gallacher. Now he has turned full blast on the Dundee newspapers. Whose turn it will be next God only knows.

And in the very same issue Thomson published a letter he had sent to Churchill which ended: “To be quite candid, if you wish to discuss anything with me on friendly terms, cut out this threat nonsense and let us discuss the matter man to man.” Churchill never replied to this letter.

If Churchill could read an election campaign, and I have no doubt he could, he must have known he was a “goner” long before the result was declared. The amazing scene at the declaration of the poll is vividly described in Gallacher’s Rolling of the Thunder and I will leave it there.

One more thing about this election I remember. The editor of our newspaper, the Communist, asked Gallacher to do a brief biography for publication. Remember this was Willie’s first parliamentary contest. How many of you municipal and parliamentary candidates have been in this same position? But the editor hadn’t bargained for what he received from Willie, which was as follows:

WILLIE GALLACHER

Dundee Communist Candidate- Story of My Life

I am born

I grow up – I go to school – I grow up more

I get a job carrying milk – I continue to grow

I leave school – I get a job with a grocer

I still grow

I get a job in an engineering shop – I began to grow in earnest

I become a knut: I join the IOGT – I’m a helluva fine fellow

Years pass – I join the Socialist movement

I lose my job

I stop growing – I go to sea – I get shipwrecked

I don’t get drowned – (What a pity)

I’m still a knut – I get married – Then get cracked

I start growing again – smaller

I go to America – become a “bum” – I return

The war starts

I grow again – crazy

I get involved in strikes – I go to gaol – I grow up again sad

I come out – The war goes on – So do I

The war ends – More strikes – More gaol

Come out again – I go to Russia – Great experience

Train on fire – Adrift in the Arctic Sea

Back again – Trouble again – Gaol again

Out again – Communist Party going strong

I become a “heid yin” – Communist Party not going strong any longer

I become a Parliamentary candidate

Great sensation – Overwhelming majority

Triumphant march to London – I enter Colney Hatch

Poor old Gallacher

Amen.

For the uninitiated, Colney Hatch is the site of a big mental hospital in north London. Willie had no romantic ideas about this election. His main aim was to expose Churchill and contribute to his final defeat. This he did handsomely as the final result showed:

Scrymgeour (Prob.) 32, 578

Morel (Lab.) 30, 292

MacDonald (N.L.) 22, 244

Churchill (N.L.) 20, 466

Pilkington (L.) 6, 681

Gallacher (Comm.) 5, 906

A year later in the 1923 General Election, Gallacher pushed his vote up to 10,380 in the same Dundee constituency, but by that time I was in the centre of world revolutionary politics- Moscow.

1922- the newly elected Prohibitionist MP for Dundee Edwyn Scrymgeour on his way to take his seat in Parliament.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 6: Into Politics Full Time

Although committed to temperance, Bob Stewart couldn’t abide the ‘religious prattling’ within the Scottish Prohibition Party.

During all the comings and goings, organising for the trade union and for the Templars, I was always drawn to political affairs. In a way this was natural, because Dundee was a politically radical city and had been so ever since the days of the Jacobins when Palmer, an associate of Thomas Muir, had been banished to the hulks in Botany Bay for his political activities. Dundee was also one of the main centres of Chartist agitation. In the 1880s and 1890s, Dundee was a real stronghold of radical liberalism and the local weekly newspaper, The People’s Journal, published strong radical views. I sold this newspaper on the streets and got fourpence a dozen; even when a boy I was doing a useful job in spreading the message.

In 1892, a political leftward move took place in Dundee when Jimmy McDonald, then secretary of the London Trades Council, stood as a Labour parliamentary candidate and polled 345 votes. In 1895 he again contested, this time as an Independent Labour Party candidate, and polled 1,313 votes. I did some campaigning for McDonald in this election and remember that the elder men thought this was an excellent vote because his candidature did not have the support of the Dundee Trades Council. A resolution which sought to support him in the Council had been defeated and an amendment to support the Liberal candidate had been carried by 19 votes to 16. It was shortly after this that I became a delegate to the Trades Council and very soon began to take part in the debates.

The Scottish Labour Party had been formed on July 23rd 1892. Many of the temperance men left the Liberal Party and joined the new party, taking their temperance views with them. But at this time I was still singularly obsessed with the struggle to stop the sale of strong drink and remained uncommitted to any political party. However, I read avidly-topical pamphlets, books theoretical and otherwise- I particularly remember several by Karl Kautsky. American temperance books and socialist pamphlets held a particular appeal, and I was always drawn to the Chartist books because they had a positive political programme.

Up to just after the turn of the century, therefore, my life 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.

On my return from South Africa I was soon back again in the organising and political groove. I became full-time organiser for the Scottish Prohibition Party with a wage of 27s. a week; this was much less than I could have earned in the yards, but political idealism was taking a hold of me and political principle was more important than money. The Prohibition Party was committed to a reformist labour programme but was semi-religious. I travelled up and down Scotland in all the big cities and in many of the villages doing propaganda meetings. We had a small newspaper called The Prohibitionist, and I helped to edit this as well.

This was the period of great political struggle to break Liberal-Labour coalition politics and for independent working-class action. In the General Election of January 1906 fifty-one Labour candidates were returned as Members of Parliament, including some fine leaders for independent working-class action such as Keir Hardie. One month later, on February 15th at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street, London, the Labour Representation Committee transformed itself into the Labour Party and thus started the final break with Liberal-Labour unity and the birth of organised independent working-class political action. One of the first demands of the independent Labour M.Ps was the passing of the Trades Disputes Act, a very progressive piece of legislation that stood the test of time for over half a century.

In the 1906 Parliamentary General Election, Alex Wilkie, general secretary of the shipwrights’ union and one of the original Labor Representation Committee of 1900-6, stood on the Labour ticket in Dundee and won. He was, however, very much a Lib-Lab politician, and, while campaigning for him, I and a number of others tried to change his ideas. Dundee was then a double-barrelled constituency, that is, there were two votes for two parliamentary seats. Wilkie was returned to Parliament together with a Liberal named Robertson.

The year 1908 was one of heavy trade depression and high unemployment, but politically it was a vintage year for me. I stood for the Dundee Town Council and won. The full-time secretary of the Prohibition Party, Scrymgeour, was also on the Council so this made a mover and seconder for any motion we desired to put. We certainly enlivened the Council meetings. The first night I took my seat we were both suspended for being “‘offenders against decorum”. I had called another councillor a liar and the Lord Provost interrupted me to warn against the use of such language. The Provost was Jimmy Urquhart and I knew he had a university education, so I asked him to tell me how I could call a man a liar without actually saying so. “See me after the meeting,” he replied, “but don’t use that word here.”

There was a Baillie on the Council called Robertson who was, among other things, a director of the Dundee Football Club. Some material had disappeared from the Council Stores and found its way to the Dundee Football Club. I called Robertson a thief. This was a bit too much for a mere reprimand. I was taken to Court and fined £5 and £8 costs, but it put a stop to a number of things that were going on. A friend of mine, Adam Piggot, a butcher, paid the fine or I would have been “inside” again, because £13 was a small fortune to me in those days.

All this was good political campaigning, because it was all official Town Council business, and the local press gave it great publicity. Dundee in 1908 was in a desperate position. Unemployment was rampant, so bad that relief work had to be arranged. Soup kitchens were erected in the wards. Farmers from the surrounding area brought in vegetables free, and local butchers donated beef and bones. Door-to- door collections for money were organised and food was
distributed to the needy- over half of the town were needy. I did an immense amount of work on relief both for the Prohibition Party and as a councillor. One helper I remember, who worked like a Trojan, was a Roman Catholic priest called Turner. He was out day and night working; and never a needy case was turned away. He was a kindly, hard-working man, which was more than could be said for many of those who did nothing but were always on hand to give advice on how the relief should be distributed.

The employment position was so bad that I moved in the Council that we provide some work for the unemployed. I suggested that to provide work trees be planted in the Blackness Road to beautify the street. Many were against it because it was spending the town’s money needlessly. However, I won; the trees were planted and are still there today. Blackness Road, lined with trees, is one of the prettiest in the city.

Blackness Road, Dundee. Early 20th century.

During the Council term I was elected as a representative to the Blind Institution Committee. Usually the meetings of the Committee lasted fifteen minutes. Minutes would be read and approved, a lot of nice things said and then everyone would go home. The Committee consisted of one or two mill owners, a few business men and representatives of the Town and Parish Councils. At my first meeting the minutes were read and approved and then I started to ask questions. There was consternation, but I knew many of the blind people living in their own homes were weaving baskets, making mattresses and the like, and were being very poorly paid. So I continued to press my questions and to get answers, which when followed up made it clear that the manager was making absurdly high profits out of the blind people’s work. On leaving the meeting, one of the mill masters, a great county cricketer, Sharp by name, said to me,
” Stewart I did not know anything like that was going on. I think it’s a scandal.” “So do I,” I replied, “but the living standard of the working class is a scandal.” He nodded his head and went away. No doubt next morning he would be demanding more effort from his jute workers to provide more profit for himself.

After a year in the Council I had to stand for re-election. A campaign was waged, in which the local press took a hand, to get Councillor Stewart, that spendthrift agitator, out of the Council. Naturally, with the expenses for relief work the rates had gone up -32d. in fact- -and I got the full blame for this. Of course I defended the relief work, but the forces against me were too strong, and I was defeated at the poll.

The year 1908 saw another famous election in Dundee. It was a Parliamentary by-election in which Winston Churchill stood as a Liberal candidate.

Winston Churchill campaigning in Dundee, 1908.

Churchill had started his parliamentary career as a Tory and won the seat at Oldham in October, 1900. In the fight for tariff reform at the beginning of the century he changed his coat and became a Liberal, contesting the North-West Manchester constituency. In the general election of 1906 he defeated Joynson Hicks in what was accepted as a safe Tory seat. In 1908 he succeeded Lloyd George as President of the Board of Trade and this necessitated a by-election. (This was the parliamentary procedure of the period: when an M.P. became a cabinet minister he had to face the electorate again.) On the 24th of April, 1908, in the by-election at North-West Manchester Jonson Hicks got his revenge and defeated Churchill, largely because of the intervention of Dan Irving, a Socialist candidate. The date is important because, while, Churchill was contesting this by-election, the Dundee Liberal Party were meeting to choose their candidate for the Dundee by-election. After a few stormy meetings the decision was postponed. There was a terrible row at the time, with the local press giving pages of publicity to the rumours that some Liberal leaders in Dundee were keeping the candidature warm for Churchill should he be defeated at Manchester. So it came about that Churchill, who was defeated as a sitting M.P. on April 24, packed his bags and was campaigning in Dundee three days later. On May 10, sixteen days after his defeat, the Dundee result was announced and Churchill was returned to Parliament and became President of the Board of Trade, but as M.P. for Dundee and not for Manchester. In this by-election I was election agent for Scrymgeour. The Prohibition Party had decided not to support the candidature of Stuart, the Labour candidate, but to put up our own candidate. It was a short but lively campaign. With four candidates in the field, the meetings were all packed out. I remember one meeting in the Drill Hall at which Churchill spoke. He shouted to the crowd: “Britain has great imperial strength. We have belted the world with free institutions.” He was speaking in Bell Street, next door to the Sheriff Court, across the road from the Salvation Home for fallen women; next door to that was the Parish Council Lunatic Department, nearby the Curr Night Refuge for homeless people to get a cup of tea and a bed, before they started their wanderings the next day. The gulf between Churchill’s oratory and the living reality was there in the street where the meeting was held. This was a good propaganda point I certainly did not miss.

During the counting of the votes I noticed Churchill standing alone in a corner twisting little rubber bands around his fingers, and as each one broke he threw it away. He was obviously in a very agitated condition.

I went over and started a conversation with him about stopping the sale of strong drink, asking what he would do in Parliament to bring this into law. It was obvious he was only interested in one thing-the result. In retrospect he was right; another defeat in Dundee after Manchester would have ruined his political career. “How do you think it’s going?” he asked me. “You’re in by a mile, worse luck,” I said. You didn’t have to look at the vote-counting very long to see that. However, our little discussion on prohibition had not gone entirely unnoticed. Later, the Provost, Jimmy Urquhart, came over to me and said: “I understand you’ve been trying to convert Winnie to prohibition. By Christ! Bob, you never give up!” 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.

Scrymgeour and I had many differences in the election campaign. He dwelt too much on religion. He had a great advantage over all the other candidates because he had a mandate from God. His speech to the crowd after the announcement of the result was really heavenly: “I feel deeply grateful to the Almighty God that has enabled the Prohibition Party to put me forward as the first British Prohibition candidate and look forward to another day when success will attend our efforts.” That speech was the beginning of the break in the Prohibition Party.

Winston Churchill was Member of Parliament for Dundee until the general election of 1922, when Willie Gallacher stood for Dundee as a Communist candidate. But in 1908 he was the hero. When the result was declared that May night, the Dundee workers not only lifted Churchill shoulder high, they lifted his motor car with him inside it and carried him down Bell Street.

A year or so after the election the inevitable split came in the Prohibition Party. I could no longer stomach the religious prattlings of Scrymgeour and some of his adherents. A number of us broke away and formed the Prohibition and Reform Party. It was at this period that I wrote the pamphlets, En Route To The Sober Commonwealth and Socialism, which were laced with good socialist principles. Apart from the aim of achieving complete National Prohibition its aims were:

SOCIALISM
The abolition of private ownership of the land and the means of manufacture, production and exchange, and the substitution of public or social ownership without compensation.

COMPLETE DEMOCRATIC RULE
Abolition of the hereditary principle in government, adult suffrage, initiative and referendum, devolution on separate Parliaments of domestic legislation.

INTERNATIONALISM
Recognition of the common interests of mankind. The establishment of international arbitration courts for the settlement of all disputes between nations, leading up to world-wide government elected by the citizens of all nations.

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.