No. 14
HISTORY Volume 2 New Series
£1.50
New Town Communism: A Personal Memoir of Crawley CP in the 1950s by David Grove
Britain’s Road to Socialism The latest edition of the CP’s programme - presents and analyses capitalism and imperialism in its current form; answers the questions of how a revolutionary transformation might be brought about in 21st Century Britain; and what a socialist and communist society in Britain might look like. The first edition was published in 1951 after nearly six years of discussion and debate across the CP, labour movement and working class. Over its 8 editions it has sold more than a million copies in Britain and helped to shape and develop the struggle of the working class for more than half a century.
Published by the Communist Party July 2015 Copyright © Communist Party 2015 Author: David Grove Series Editor: Graham Stevenson ISBN 978-1-908315-26-7
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HISTORY 1
Our History No. 14
No. 14
Vol. 2, New Series
ÂŁ1.50
New Town Communism
A Personal Memoir of Crawley CP in the 1950s
by David Grove
CONTENTS page Preface The collective The special character of Crawley The good work begins Finding the link The first rents campaign The great demonstration and rent strike Crawley the planned New Town Not just rent campaigns Branch secretary A traumatic year Attitudes to the Soviet Union Recovery Local elections Three ways of publicising party policies Sussex District A memorable meeting Dissenting views Party culture Public sources The used Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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Preface Having joined the Communist Party in 1942 when a student at Oxford University, David Grove spent three years in the navy before returning to Oxford and resuming activity in the Party’s student branch. In 1948, he began a career as an economist in urban and regional planning, which he pursued in the UK and latterly in several other countries. David was active in the Communist Party’s Architects & Planners Group and in the East Newcastle and Bedford branches before moving to Crawley new town in 1951 at the age of 28, immediately becoming the local Communist Party branch secretary. In recent years, David Grove has been the secretary of the Leicester & District branch and is currently the Chair of the Midlands District of the Communist Party of Britain. He has completed his memoirs, which includes this full and instructive account of Party life in Crawley. Our History hopes that a newer generation will find lessons in this account and even that other veterans will put pen to paper. The Communist Party History Group is also interested in any suggestions for future editions of Our History, contact: history@communist-party,org.uk
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Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s— A Personal Memoir
by David Grove The collective Ralph Russell has said the first advice he’d give to an active communist would be to stay in the same place for 20 years. Fair enough – but in Crawley I proved how much can be done in half that time. For when I left in 1961 a hundred people paid to come to my leaving party. And about half of them were Labour Party members –even though the gathering was in a pub in the middle of Northgate ward, which I’d contested three times against Labour in the local elections. I’m making it sound like an ego-trip – but the point is that the people at the event were showing their respect for the CP as much as, or more than, any affection for me. As a middle class intellectual I’d been privileged to give political and organisational guidance to a Party branch made up almost entirely of factory and building workers in a predominantly working class town. But I couldn’t have done it except as part of a strong collective leadership, the finest group of comrades I’ve ever worked with. I’d met Ted Rogers in 1959 at a Party conference in Newcastle when we talked about the problems of Peterlee, the new town where I was then working. Shortly after I moved to Crawley and was still living in digs there was a knock at the door one evening and there stood Ted. He was a bricklayer who hailed from Sunderland and was active in the Young Communist League before the war. Then he helped to organise the workers on vast wartime construction sites before joining the army. He was badly wounded by a dive bomber in North Africa and his face and hands had to be remade by lengthy plastic surgery. That’s one reason why he’d recently moved to the gentler climate in the south. He was a local leader of the AUBTW (bricklayers and hod carriers) and the The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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NFBTO (the federation of building trade unions). Cycling to work one morning I passed several dozen building workers, with Ted at their head, marching to the Development Corporation’s offices in a country house on the edge of Crawley. They were demanding action to end the unfair practices of one of the big firms building the new town. Ted and I shared a lot of interests, including boats, and we became firm friends. His greatest strength is an unsurpassed ability to get other people to do things. Dick Vines moved to a house just around the corner from the one we eventually got. When I first called on him he was busy in the kitchen doing the weekly wash; his wife was out at a meeting! Dick was a machinist, an active AEU member and convenor of shop stewards at APV, the biggest factory to move to Crawley. (Originally called the Aluminium Plant & Vessel Company, APV eventually diversified.) He was one of those all-round citizens of whom there were many in the Communist Party. He was captain of the APV cricket XI and had been presented with a special silver trophy for being the first player ever to score a century. He played the trumpet in the Crawley Silver Band. Joe Sack came to Crawley a bit later with Edwards, the second biggest engineering works to move to the town. He was an inspector and an active member of the AEU. Self-educated, he was a creative Marxist, sometimes dogmatic but always articulate, for ever seeking the main issue at a given moment. Dave Hook had trained as a plumber after a long time in the army, starting as a boy and including service in India. I think he joined the Party on one of the highly organised and militant Festival of Britain construction sites. He had a tremendous fund of songs and stories and an irrepressible sense of humour. His greatest contribution to Party work in Crawley was to sell the Daily Worker every Saturday in the town square for several years. Albert Poyton was a toolmaker at Youngman’s, the first factory to open in the new town’s industrial area. He’d been in Malaya with the army and had met local Party members in Singapore. Roy Hathaway was another plumber who moved in later. Tony Stoker was a chippy from Southport. The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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Dave Hook pictured selling the Daily Worker in Crawley Those comrades were the core of the branch committee, especially during the golden years. Ted and Dick and Joe, like me but unlike the others I’ve named, had wives who were also Party members; Enid Rogers, Eileen Sack and Maggie Vines gave their husbands loyal support and were also active campaigners. Many other men and women made important contributions to branch work over the years. I recall especially Steve Lonsdale, Alistair Knox, Les and Barbara Martin, Liz and Alan Thompson, Maurice and Joyce Crighton, Harry and Joyce Challis, Harry and Win Harwood, Joe and Carmel Paton, Reg and Jean Hallwood, Mike West, Harry Cutts, Bill Jordan, Pat Lee, Bob Ure and Laurie Hickey. There were lots more whose names, and even their faces, I’ve forgotten.
The special character of Crawley Despite a rich experience of struggle in factories, on building sites and in the streets, and a deep commitment to the cause, our collective couldn’t have achieved all it did without the unusually favourable objective conditions in Crawley. I identified five significant features.
* First, there was the rapid growth of the new town; during the 1950s the population increased from 10 000 to 50 000. This brought in a steady flow of transferred Party members: 74 during the ten years. But the branch also recruited 67 new members during that period. Because 31 members left the town and 37 resigned, the total membership at the end of the period was only 73. The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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* Second, most people both lived and worked in Crawley. In its early days the new town had some of the features of a mining village. The solidarity of the workplaces was carried into the neighbourhoods. Trade union branches were built around one or two large factories and building sites. Their members shared social as well as industrial concerns, so were ready to campaign on such local issues as high rents, shortage of school places, lack of a hospital. * Third, the new towners were almost all youngish married couples with growing families. They shared the same aspirations and faced the same problems. So they were more ready to work together for common aims – especially any issue that affected their children’s future. (This feature had a negative side. It was difficult for couples to go out together in the evening; husbands and wives were naturally reluctant to go out alone. This made it harder to staff voluntary organisations, including of course the CP, other political parties, tenants’ associations, peace groups, etc. During my time in Crawley the Party branch didn’t have one retired or single person among its members.) * Fourth, because this was a new town, incomers were aware of the plans that showed sites for schools, hospital, meeting places, playing fields, and other amenities that were slow to materialise. The contrast between promise and performance was one of the driving forces of political struggle. * Fifth, everyone in the new town, including Party members, was making a fresh start in new surroundings. The Party branch was not hampered by memories of past failures or a legacy of sectarianism. Other organisations of the labour movement enjoyed a similar freedom from past constraints. I think this accounts in part for the very cordial relations among Party members as well as between Communists and Labour people. Despite these differences between a new town and an established community, workers and their families in Crawley faced the same fundamental problems as workers in any capitalist society: rising costs, pressure on wages, job insecurity, inadequate public services. Successful political leadership sprang from the effort to express such general issues in Crawley Tenants Association float at a local carnival c. 1960 terms appropriate to the special conditions in our town. The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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Crawley Tenants Association float at a local carnival c. 1960 It’s also relevant to note that during those first ten years we were struggling against a Conservative government, and for a time against Tory-dominated local councils. This made it easier to promote united action with Labour people than it would have been under a Labour government.
The good work begins The first few CP members were attached to the Horsham branch, which covered the whole of north-west Sussex. Helped by comrades from Horsham and East Grinstead (especially Hilary Henslow and Ken Stubbs) Ted Rogers established a Daily Worker Discussion Group to prepare the way for a Party branch. With guidance from District Secretary Jim Saunders, the branch was founded early in 1952 at a small but enthusiastic meeting in Ted’s caravan, parked in a muddy field that later became part of the new town centre. One of our members (though he didn’t come to meetings) was old T A (Tommy) Jackson, a distinguished Marxist writer; he’d been living in retirement near Crawley for some years. Ted was elected chairman. I think Ken Stubbs was the first secretary, but he was soon replaced by a Crawley comrade, Albert Poyton. So long as I was Research Officer at the Development Corporation, a fairly public position, I couldn’t do open Party work, so I became branch treasurer. I’ve never taken kindly to handling money or appealing for funds, but by adopting an The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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organisational approach to the task I made it more enjoyable and effective. I stuck it for five years. With a falling national membership (down to 33 000 in 1956) the CP struggled to pay its full-time workers and fund its campaigns, but the Crawley branch generally managed to raise its quota. I also wrote most of the branch’s leaflets and statements, putting in all my knowledge, experience and writing skill. But they also were collective efforts; most of my drafts were subjected to searching criticism.
Finding the link Our little band was determined to campaign on local as well as national issues; after a lot of discussion we agreed that high rents affected the greatest number of people, and revealed most sharply the effect of Tory policies. Rents of new town houses were significantly higher than those of comparable council houses in London, which would have been the alternative for most Crawley tenants. This fixed weekly payment was felt as a burden by a typical household with just one earner, facing the costs of setting up home and raising a family, and the higher prices in Crawley. An exposure of the causes of high rents would (as Joe Sack later put it) lift a corner of the veil hiding capitalist exploitation. We said (quoting, I think, Lenin) that we’d found the link that would drag the whole chain forward. And so it turned out.
The first rents campaign The branch opened the campaign in August 1952 with our first leaflet Rents can come down, focusing on interest rates, subsidies, and building costs, linking these with Tory military expenditure and colonial wars. The leaflet was put through every door in the new town. My wife Liz and I took a couple of hundred to the flat where Dick Vines was living near Clapham Common; he handed them out in the APV factory before most of its workers moved to Crawley. The next step was to develop a broad movement against high rents. The The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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obvious vehicle was the Crawley Tenants’ Association (CTA), which was well - established among local council tenants and now embraced tenants of the Development Corporation as well. So one Sunday morning Ted and I called on the CTA chairman, Victor Pellen. Vic was already a friend. He was a local lad who had become a primary school teacher, and had been briefly in the CP before our time. He was now an active left-winger in the Labour Party. Vic agreed to try and get the CTA to set up a special committee to study the rent question. The Rents Committee was set up in November to investigate the reasons for the high rents locally, and…to take vigorous action for their abatement. The committee had official representatives from three CTA neighbourhood groups, the Labour and Communist Parties, the Trades Council, five trade union branches, APV shop stewards and the Cooperative Women’s Guild. The local Conservative Party originally accepted an invitation to join the committee but then withdrew on the grounds that it was a communist plot. There were in fact four CP members out of the sixteen delegates on the Rents Committee. As our Party made no secret of its initiative and influence, the Tory attack cut little ice. Indeed, the campaign was a model of how communists should work in a broad movement: the Party campaigned openly under its own banner alongside the efforts of its members in other organisations to which they belonged. So no accusations of infiltration would stick. The Rents Committee at first ignored the big factors causing high rents and got bogged down in marginal matters such as wasted materials and poor finishes. The Party branch saw that it was time for another initiative and prepared a Memorandum on the Rents Problem – seven duplicated foolscap pages; in February 1953 we sent it to every organisation in the town. In writing the memorandum I drew heavily on an article by Graeme Shankland in Town Planning Review (a rather celebrated architect who was a Communist); I think he’d made use of material assembled by Margot Heinemann. We showed that over 60 years tenants would pay almost twice the cost of building a house, while with the subsidy added the financiers The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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Communist Party History Group Willie Gallacher, former Communist MP, speaking in Crawley
would get back almost three times what they had lent. We followed up the memorandum with a second widely distributed leaflet: Rents must come down. In September the report of the Rents Committee was published as a special issue of the CTA Newsletter and was widely read. It followed closely the analysis in the CP memorandum; its first recommendation was that the interest rate on loans for new town housing should be cut from 4 per cent to 2 per cent. The latter figure became the defining slogan of the campaign. Dick had recently returned from a visit to Poland with a catchy little folk song. Liz used the tune for a song that began We must bring the rate of interest down to 2 per cent, ha ha, on the money lent, ha ha, by the government; we all sang it at a tenants’ social. Ernest Marples, then Parliamentary Secretary to the Housing Minister, paid an official visit to Crawley and wherever he went in the neighbourhoods and the industrial area deputations handed him copies of the Rents Report. A petition endorsing the report attracted 2 000 signatures; the Parish Council gave support. The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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And that was about it. We failed to carry out any sort of mass action to follow up the report. The only suggestion was a march on the Corporation offices; this could have stirred things up, but we didn’t push hard enough for it and the chance was lost. I don’t recall anybody asking if there was a realistic possibility of winning a reduction in rents. In those early days of the new towns the development corporations were certainly vulnerable to sustained pressure. Perhaps concerted action by people in several new towns might have forced concessions; but I don’t think this was suggested. Much later Party centre called several conferences of new town branches; these were useful exchanges of experience but didn’t result in any joint action. But Crawley CP’s campaign had educated a lot of local people in the mysteries of housing finance and laid the basis for subsequent mass action, not indeed to bring rents down, but to resist the increases that were imposed two years later.
The great demonstration and rent strike In 1954 Tory legislation removed rent restrictions from Corporation tenants and took away their security of tenure. On 17 October 1955, 5 000 tenants received notices to quit with offers of new tenancies at higher rents. That evening members of the CP branch committee spontaneously gathered in our kitchen on their way home from work, a heartening demonstration of the spirit of the collective. Alas, that spirit was not kept up through the ensuing events. That night, though, we knew the moment for militant action had arrived, the day the Party had been preparing for.. Two thousand tenants attended five neighbourhood meetings during the week following the notices. On the Saturday there was a spontaneous demonstration of several hundred outside the housing office. Shop stewards called for industrial action. On 26 October about 11 am a brass band marched down Manor Royal, the spine road of the new industrial area, and as it passed each factory most of the workers came out and joined the procession. It was a rare example of an industrial stoppage on a nonindustrial issue. Building workers and housewives joined in; 5 000 people The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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with hastily made banners and placards marched to the town centre; a mass meeting unanimously agreed not to pay the increases. Next week a clear majority of tenants paid only the old rents. But divisions immediately appeared in the leadership of Crawley Tenants’ Association (CTA); those who shrank from further militant action carried the day. Their attitude was reflected in the sticker every household was asked to display. Instead of saying something like Not paying the rent increase it simply read Keep Rents Down. Our Newcastle comrade Cameron Walton was staying with us at the time; he thought the CTA slogan was about as specific as Eat More Fruit! At meetings with the Development Corporation and the Parish Council, Vic Pellen stressed minor demands such as publishing the housing accounts and democratising the Corporation, rather than concentrating on the key issues of interest and profit. I was disappointed in Vic but we remained good friends until his recent death in Australia. It was clear that the first great industrial action had rattled the authorities. The Corporation hastened to promise that rents would not be increased again for three years; the government announced a small increase in the subsidy for new town houses. These were the only concrete gains to come out of the action. Before the rent increase was announced, the CP branch had booked the big hall in the new West Green community centre for a public meeting in midNovember with William Gallacher, Party chairman and former MP. In the middle of a mass action the meeting now assumed great importance, especially as Gallacher had been one of the leaders of the great Glasgow rent strike in 1915. Liz designed a broad banner with impressions of a Clydeside demonstration on the left and the Crawley demonstration on the right. It was painted by Ken Sprague and made an impressive background to the platform, where Joe was in the chair with Ted and Dick as local speakers. A beautifully illustrated book on Ken’s life and work was published in 2002. I believe the banner is now in Crawley Museum. The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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Crawley— the planned New Town While the meeting was taking place, I was representing the Development Corporation at a Youth Committee meeting in an adjoining room. We were deploring how hard it was to get people out of their homes in the evening when a large crowd streamed out of the main hall and the County Youth Officer observed Mr Gallacher seems to have got them out! The meeting was a great success and several people joined the Party.
Meanwhile, several hundred tenants were still not paying the increase, but the number dwindled week by week and we failed to find a way of injecting new impetus into the campaign. There were fears of possible eviction but the alternative of negotiation and compromise was never seriously considered. There were no leaflets, meetings, demonstrations, only a handful of letters to the local newspapers. The militants were more and more isolated. The APV shop stewards, the most experienced group of workers, recommended that the strike be called off, but this was not made generally known. In the Party and the CTA several resolutions to end the strike were defeated, but by increasingly narrow majorities. On 9 February, when about 300 tenants were still holding out, the CTA executive decided to call it off. The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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Appraisal The Party held a special branch meeting to evaluate the campaign. Liz Grove opened the discussion with a balanced and self-critical statement, emphasising our failure to give continuous and consistent political and organisational leadership. We had not found new ways of keeping the initial militancy alive, we had allowed the CTA and the trade unions to drift apart. The Gallacher meeting was the only independent public activity by the CP, which had not even held regular meetings of the branch or the committee. There were lots of reasons for these weaknesses: • The branch secretary had resigned early in 1955 and we had not found an effective replacement; collective leadership languished. • We were dizzy with success after the industrial stoppage and the great demonstration; the praise lavished on us in the national Party press went to our heads. • None of us had any experience of comparable action; the district and central leaderships gave us encouragement but little concrete advice. • At a critical time our resources were diverted into making a success of the meeting with Gallacher. • We had failed to appreciate the significance of the local Labour Party’s initial support for the rent strike and had not gone out of our way to cement unity. • During the two years since the Rents Report we had lost sight of the need to guide and strengthen the CTA. Certainly we could have done better had we recognised and tackled these problems, and deployed our small forces in a more concentrated way. But the question remains whether those forces were strong enough to have made a material difference to the outcome. Be it noted that all the CP members had young children and that the critical time for the campaign coincided with Christmas and New Year. At the special branch meeting 12 comrades expressed their views and only two thought the rent strike should have been called off sooner. Looking The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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back after 50 years, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to make the most of the concessions the action had won from the Corporation and the government, to end the strike with a dramatic gesture while it still had mass support, perhaps to march on the Corporation’s offices with an offer to negotiate. Though I was not able to take part, the heroic actions of the Crawley workers and tenants were a high point in my political experience. They gave me confidence that in compelling circumstances ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things. The events also showed the need for a larger and more effective Communist Party. I wonder how many of the younger generation in Crawley today know anything about the events of 1955. Are they mentioned in any social study of the new town? If one of today’s pressing needs is to make young people more aware of past struggles for a fairer society, where better to start than with the history of their own locality? Those Crawley residents who read Ted’s autobiography will surely be inspired by his account of the campaign. I was delighted to learn that Crawley Museum were contemplating a special exhibition on the rent strike.
Not just rent campaigns We saw the rents issue as the main link in the chain. But the branch didn’t neglect other links. Members took part in campaigns to speed up the building of schools, to provide nursery schools, to build the hospital and community centres. These various issues were brought together in local elections; there was a communist candidate every year I was in Crawley. In 1953 the Party produced – and sold on the doorsteps – a 6-page printed document A Socialist Policy for Crawley. Next year we published a similar document Crawley: the Way Forward. Rereading them now I’m surprised and impressed by how thoroughly they linked local, national and international issues. The Socialist Policy began by contrasting the benefits promised in the new The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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town with the actual burdens: high rents and rates, life without the planned amenities and services, the threat of unemployment and falling living standards. It pinned the blame squarely on the Tory government’s policies, especially the arms bill, the cold war and colonial wars. In The Way Forward sections on peace, rents, schools and local rates were prefaced by short extracts from The British Road to Socialism (adopted as national CP policy at the 1952 Congress) and from our own Socialist Policy for Crawley. Both our publications stressed the role of the Communist Party in the struggle against the Tories and the right-wing Labour and trade union leaders. The second leaflet ended with a section entitled Socialism in our lifetime and its last words were We call on all who care for the greatness of our country and the welfare of its people to unite now in a mighty effort to win the battle for peace and progress. Here indeed was Gramsci’s optimism of the will. Was there enough pessimism of the intellect? Were we deceiving ourselves and the people of Crawley? We know now that the Tories would not be defeated for another ten years, and that the policies of right-wing Labour governments that followed would lead to many more years of Tory rule. The two main reasons were the divisions in the labour movement and the rise in living standards during the long boom. The first we knew all about but perhaps we underestimated the difficulties of winning unity; the second we didn’t foresee and maybe couldn’t have foreseen. But it’s worth noting that the rise in workers’ living standards was mainly due to the winning of higher wages in workplace negotiations; in this process, communists and their allies had a decisive role. They wouldn’t have fought so assiduously without the perspective of united advance towards a fairer society. As one of the characters in O’Casey’s play Red Roses For Me says about a demand for a shilling wage increase, they saw the shilling in the shape of a new world. I think we were right to keep the vision of socialism in front of people at every opportunity but wrong to use the over-confident phrase socialism in our lifetime! What might have been feasible in 1945 was not so in the 1950s and 1960s. We were right too to say that unity of the left could defeat the Tories, but perhaps we should have recognised that what we’d achieved in The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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Crawley wasn’t going to happen in enough places to bring early results. Most of the national battles we were fighting then have still to be fought and won. Perhaps some people, Party members and others, disenchanted by failure to achieve promised gains, became cynical and dropped out of the struggle. But on balance I believe our efforts weren’t wasted. The current revival of militancy must owe something to the legacy of past struggles. Still, at a local level it was important to have short-term successes. And we did. Our publications recorded how militant action had led to the speeding up of school building, a start on the first community centre, and weekly dustbin collections, as well as persuading the Parish Council to support the campaign for lower rents. Not earth-shaking – but significant. Sometimes a campaign doesn’t win its demands but has an unforeseen spin-off. I knew of one example that I couldn’t make public. In 1953 when West Sussex County Council still hadn’t allocated any money for a community centre, some Corporation officers, me among them, prepared a proposal for the Corporation to fund three modest timber huts, one in each of the neighbourhoods then being built. The board’s approval was in doubt. The board meeting to decide on the proposal came just after the publication of the Rents Report and the collection of 2 000 signatures in support of it; I don’t think it was a coincidence that our proposal went through. The huts were quickly built and were well used for many years. The Party branch used the Northgate one several times for public meetings and Daily Worker bazaars. Several female comrades were active in the local branch of the National Assembly of Women. Among other things they produced an excellent statement on the need for nursery schools; nothing came of it then and we failed to follow it up. The branch didn’t neglect national and international issues, especially the campaign for peaceful coexistence. In November 1954 John Gollan, who was to become general secretary of the Communist Party two years later, spoke to 90 people at a public meeting. It was a real gathering of the left and laid the basis for Crawley’s tremendous response to the parliamentary lobby against German rearmament in January when three coachloads, including The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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official representatives of a dozen organisations, travelled to Westminster. This was the night when my wife Liz, seven months pregnant with Sorrell, had to run from mounted police in Parliament Square.
Branch secretary In December 1955 I left the Development Corporation and went to work for the London County Council. I was now free to do public work as a Communist in Crawley. Early in 1956 the annual branch meeting elected me as secretary. It was a good decision – for me and for the branch. I had experience, knowledge and dedication. I was enthusiastic for organisation. I set myself high standards and encouraged others to do the same – but I didn’t fret when we often fell short of our aspirations. Above all, I was in touch with the working class movement through our excellent collective, but as I was free from trade union commitments I could devote more time to the Party than other leading comrades could. There was a branch of my union, the AScW, in Crawley but I only ever attended one meeting. All the other members were concentrated in a couple of factories and we had no common industrial interests. If I had attended meetings and put the Party line that would have seemed like infiltration, especially as my lack of trade union experience would have been apparent. I felt sure I could contribute much more to the cause by giving my available time wholly to the Party. Not all the comrades agreed. Harry Harwood, who was secretary of Crawley Trades Council, considered I was neglecting a Party duty and in principle he was right. Perhaps he also thought I didn’t give enough weight to the vital role of the trade union movement. If so, he was wrong. Ever since joining the Party I’ve seen the trade unions as the basic organisations of the working class. They are the country’s most representative and democratic bodies. Their importance for communists has increased in the perspective of Britain’s Road to Socialism, with its vision of mass pressure transforming parliament and the state into instruments of socialist revolution. Despite what many of its opponents – and some of its The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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supporters – assert, this programme is not a parliamentary road to socialism; it is a revolutionary road with a central role for parliament, but as the servant, not the master, of the people. At the time of writing, the trade unions, as the principal stakeholders in the Labour Party, have the main responsibility for reclaiming the party for working class politics. One of the standard anti-communist arguments used by the right wing is that the CP’s influence in the unions depends on the apathy of most members. The Crawley experience exposed this as the exact opposite of the truth. In those early days when the unions were most militant and the left most united, branch meetings of the engineering and building unions were generally crowded. And this in turn was largely due to the work of Communists and other left-wingers in the factories and on the building sites. I was invited as CP secretary to address several union branch meetings; I had large and attentive audiences. However, I’ve had misgivings about the amount of effort the CP, and especially its full-time workers, put into getting communists and their close allies elected to leading positions in the trade union movement. It’s important that Party members should occupy some of these key positions; often they do so at the behest of their workmates. But the effort to get them elected may sometimes be at the expense of the more important task of increasing the activity and raising the political consciousness of the rankand-file; even worse, it is sometimes seen as a substitute for it. The aforementioned comrade Harry Harwood did a fine job as secretary of the Trades Council, but it took a lot of his time and virtually kept him out of other political activity; I often wondered whether we had the balance right.
A traumatic year My time as branch secretary started well. The labour movement in Crawley was given a great lift by APV’s 3-week strike against threatened redundancies, led by communist and other left shop stewards. With tremendous local support, it was the hardest fought and most successful stoppage in the new town. It happened that we’d already booked Harry The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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Pollitt to speak at a public meeting at this time; it was a big success. In the first elections to the new Urban District Council, Ted Rogers gained 200 votes, a fifth of the number for the three successful Labour candidates; this was the last time the electors in Northgate ward had more than one vote. But soon I had to cope with the fall-out from the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the Anglo/French/Israeli invasion of Egypt, and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising. Nikita Krushchev’s revelation of the crimes of the Stalin era came as a severe shock to most communists and supporters. It seemed that some of the accusations that we had usually denied were true after all. The old Bolsheviks condemned in the show trials had not been traitors; socialist democracy had languished; opponents had been consigned to the gulag. Krushchev put all the crimes down to the cult of personality. I accepted this explanation for a while but gradually came to see how inadequate it was. The disclosures began a process of questioning and self-questioning that burgeoned and has continued to this day. I began to wonder how many mature Marxists there are in the world. No sooner had we begun to come to terms with the 20th Congress than there burst on us the violent uprising against the communist government of Hungary and its brutal suppression by the Soviet Union. The Party was in turmoil. The national leadership endorsed the Soviet action. At a wellattended meeting of the Crawley branch, including some comrades we rarely saw, a large majority supported them. Of course the discussion continued; in 1956 and 1957 the Crawley branch, like the Party nationally, lost about a third of its members. But none of our leading members left; branch and committee meetings continued to be regularly held. Indeed, though we lost 24 members in those two years we also attracted eight new ones. Some comrades we’d worked with in the Labour Party and the unions expressed strong opposition to our line but there was none of the violent hostility reported by John Peck in Nottingham. I thought it was important to distinguish between the misdeeds of the Hungarian leaders, which had clearly led to the uprising, and the actions of The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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the USSR. Liz and I (mainly Liz) wrote a 2-page contribution to the discussion in World News (January 1957) arguing that a counter-revolution in Hungary, by shifting the balance of power in Europe, would have greatly increased the danger of imperialist action against the socialist countries. We pointed out that the peace movement in the west was not strong enough to prevent war on its own; peaceful coexistence still rested on the military strength of the Soviet Union. Rereading our words today I’m reminded of something I’d forgotten (and most other people have too): according to The Times and the New York Times it was the Soviet proposal for joint action against the aggressors that finally ended the fighting in Egypt. There had been a short stoppage in a couple of Crawley factories against the Suez invasion – was this the only such strike in Britain? Our piece was attacked in the next issue of World News by the great Marxist and peace campaigner Professor J D Bernal. He suggested that our belief that Soviet power had averted a threat of war implied there was no need for a peace movement. This was certainly not our intention; indeed, we’d quoted Krushchev’s remark that the peace movement was a powerful factor.
Attitudes to the Soviet Union At the 1957 Party congress Johnny Gollan asked me to speak from the platform against an amendment deleting solidarity with the Soviet Union from the main political resolution. This I was happy to do. I believed then – and still believe – that defending the first socialist state was a duty of every Communist. The Soviet Union was attacked by bourgeois propagandists not because of infringements of human rights or curtailments of democracy – there were plenty of those in the self-styled “free world.” It was attacked because of its opposition to imperialism, its material and moral support for the growing national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. The very existence of the Soviet Union was a challenge to the capitalist system; every government feared that its revolutionary example might be followed by their own working class. Hence The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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their readiness to make concessions. Joe Sack once said The Soviet comrades are right until they say they’re wrong − and then they’re still right. I wouldn’t have put it like that but it was the way I acted in practice. Joe and I, along with many others, later modified this view in the light of undoubted facts. But in those more innocent and certain days we were very much aware that negative reports on the Soviet Union came in the main from reactionaries opposed to socialism and the labour movement, or from the ultra-left. Their lies and distortions about British working class leaders and activities we easily recognised and tried to expose. It was natural to conclude that they were equally wrong about the Soviet Union. Most of us had neither the time nor the training to make an objective study of the available material. We relied on the Party’s full-time staff to do that and to publicise the results. It was their job. But they in turn relied mainly on what came from the Soviet leadership – and we’ve learned that this was not a totally reliable source. How far and in what way the duty to defend the Soviet Union could have been combined with critical judgements is an issue I still feel unclear about. The problem arises in commenting on the policies and actions of fraternal parties anywhere. Ralph Russell says if you think they’re wrong, you should say so. I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s hard enough to determine the best course for the progressive forces in one’s own country, even with a lifetime of hands-on experience. After living and working in Ghana for three years in the 1960s and studying all the available sources, I felt confident enough to make judgements on its leading Party’s role and polices. But how much do I know about the balance of forces in South Africa or Iraq today? So I suggest we need to have more fraternal discussions and ask awkward questions but remain cautious about public criticism. However, I believe that whatever we’d said about the Soviet Union in the past, most people would – quite rightly – have associated British Communists with Soviet successes and shortcomings. Contrary to the view of some historians, I hold that any changes in our attitude to the Soviet Union would have made no more than a marginal difference to the standing of the Communist Party as a British political party. The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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Recovery In August I submitted a plan of activity for the winter of 1956/57. It was approved by branch committee. Of course it was too ambitious but it laid the basis for the recovery and extension of public activity during the five years I was at the helm. The Crawley context was no longer so favourable to militant action. Labour had won a big majority on the new district council and their active members tended to become bogged down in the details of council business. Though the town was still growing rapidly, the proportion of industrial workers among incomers was lower; later factories were mostly small and unorganised. As a result of earlier struggles, the new neighbourhoods had better social facilities, especially schools; so it was harder to find local issues needing urgent action. When the three-year rent standstill won in 1955 ran out, the Corporation was able to impose an immediate increase with very little opposition, despite a prompt CP reaction with a leaflet, letters to the local papers, and resolutions in union branches. We tended to concentrate on national and international issues. Our biggest impact was in winning considerable support from the labour movement for the AntiApartheid Campaign and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, in both of which Party members had a prominent part. At first the Party opposed CND, fearing that its campaign would The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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prejudice the growing support in the labour movement for negotiations between the nuclear powers on multilateral disarmament. I expressed these reservations at an early CND meeting and got a frosty reception. But Dave Hook went on the first Easter march (to Aldermaston) and returned full of enthusiasm, which the Party branch soon shared. Liz and I took our three children on the next two marches from Aldermaston to London. These four-day demonstrations, when diverse thousands slept in schools and church halls with sore feet, were full of music and colour, with a high level of organisation supported by relaxed self-discipline; they were among my most fulfilling political experiences. My favourite memory is marching up Whitehall twelve abreast, singing We Shall Overcome at the tops of our voices, accompanied by dozens of guitars, with Liz’s voice soaring up in the high harmonies. Stan Banks, the dynamic and forthright CND organiser in the town, had a great respect for the work of Party members. It was mainly because of Communist activity in the workplaces and union branches that there were more industrial workers from Crawley than from most other places on the Aldermaston marches and other CND demos. It was much the same in the campaign to boycott South African goods, where several Party members, especially Harry Challis and Maurice Crighton, played leading roles. I was impressed by Harry’s pledge that the Party branch would be responsible on certain Saturdays for staffing the stall in the town square; the comrades didn’t let him down. This was one campaign in which – later, when Mandela was released – we felt our work had helped to change the course of history. As in the rents campaigns, we made sure that the CP was seen to be acting independently on these issues alongside the work of our members in the broad organisations.
Local elections In 1959 I agreed to take Ted’s place as the Party candidate in Northgate ward. There was a modest increase in our vote from 59 to 78. Then in 1960 it leapt to 110; in 1961 it was 115. That year Roy Hathaway stood in Langley The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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Green ward and also got more than a ton of votes. These figures were one measure of the growing influence of the branch. But our votes were only about ten per cent of the Labour vote in those wards. I enjoyed electioneering, especially writing the election addresses and canvassing homes. On the doorstep I generally sold more literature than other comrades, I suppose because I approached people with cheerful confidence. But I came to the conclusion after three years that it was a mistake for the same person to be both branch secretary and local candidate; the combined commitment was too much and both tasks suffered. Another measure of our recovery was the number of recruits: 18 in 1958-59 compared with only 8 in 1956-57; but there had been 25 in 1954-55, in a smaller town and from a smaller base.
Three ways of publicising party policies In 1959 and again in 1961 I was asked to write articles in the Party weekly World News on the work of the branch – a singular honour and a tribute to our collective. One of the act ivities I stressed was leaflet distribution in the neighbourhoods and at the factory gates. In 1960 we gave out 13 000 leaflets, some national but most written and printed by the branch with a local slant. Handing out leaflets in the industrial area was one of the most exciting 1961—May Day march in Crawley The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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and satisfying forms of political action I’ve ever engaged in. In those days almost everybody cycled to work in Manor Royal; for 15 minutes before starting time there was a continuous stream of cyclists into the bigger factories. They didn’t want to slow down or to take the right hand off the handlebar. The later it got the faster they pedalled. So we had to position ourselves very carefully. The A5 leaflets, carefully folded into three so as to be fairly rigid, were held out at the end of an extended arm and seized by the cyclist in his left hand. Most men took one (there were hardly any women). I had the impression they expected the Party to be there and wanted to hear what we had to say. When the stragglers had gone in about ten past eight I got on my bike and rode madly to Three Bridges station to catch the London train. There’s no doubt the leaflets had an effect, the greater because we appeared frequently over several years. They helped comrades in the factories to start discussions with their workmates. Another way of making Party policy known to a lot of people is letters to the local press. I wrote many during my five years as branch secretary, and gradually perfected a technique of keeping them short and punchy, and if possible hooking them on to something that had already appeared in the paper, either news or a letter. I’m still using that technique to good effect. Other comrades wrote letters too – but not as many as we might have had printed. For a time three local papers were published in Crawley, and their competition increased the chances of getting coverage for the Party. They printed news of our activities as well as letters, and once even a leader headed The thin red line. I took all three papers of course, and every week clipped all the letters and stories relating to the Party and the labour movement. I eventually had a fine collection of cuttings covering ten years of activity. I left it with my successor as branch secretary. When I enquired about it some 20 years later nobody knew what had happened to it. That’s a pity; I’d love to see those cuttings now. The third form of public activity I’d like to highlight is one that seems to have been overlooked in recent years: the poster parade. The branch mounted two or three a year during this period. Around a dozen comrades carrying home made posters with snappy slogans would march through the The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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town centre, keeping about 20 yards apart and walking in the gutter at the edge of the pavement. It could be very effective.
Sussex District In addition to local and national leaflets we used to give out a leaflet produced by the district on the day of the Chancellor’s annual budget. Several times I helped Jack Perkins, who had succeeded Jim Saunders as Sussex district secretary, to write the leaflet. I travelled straight from work to Brighton, we listened to the BBC news for the budget details, then tried to think up some pungent comments. A local printer was lined up to produce several hundred copies. We impressed the workers of Manor Royal when we offered them a communist slant on the budget even before they’d read about it in the morning papers. This was one of the few concrete ways in which the district CP organisation was able to help the Crawley branch. We were the largest and most active branch in Sussex with about a third of the district membership. Our collective leadership was as mature and devoted as that of the district. So we tended to go our own way. This was resented in Brighton where it was felt that because of our size and experience we should give more help to other branches. Socially and economically the rest of Sussex was so different from Crawley that we had little interest in it. Several Crawley comrades served on the district committee at different times without much enthusiasm. I always enjoyed going to Brighton but didn’t get much out of the meetings. For a time I was on the secretariat, the small group of comrades elected to make decisions between district committee meetings, but I never felt the time and travel was worth while. Because Crawley branch was big and strong, district tended to set us ambitious targets, e.g. for recruiting new members. We never convinced them that because we’d made more recruits than other Sussex branches we probably had fewer opportunities of making a lot more. The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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A memorable meeting In my reports for World News I also made much of our public meetings. The most successful was the one that celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Communist Party in 1960. The speaker was John Gollan, who had succeeded Harry Pollitt as general secretary. We prepared very thoroughly. Every member had a supply of tickets a month before the meeting date. Leaflets, posters and letters to TU branches created the climate for maximum ticket sales. A subcommittee met weekly to check on sales and strengthen any weak sectors. We sold 350 tickets; 120 people attended the meeting, only a quarter of them Party members. We collected £20 (the expenses would have been about £5). At previous public meetings, despite appeals from the platform, it had proved very hard to win recruits, probably because most of the people who came to our public meetings were well known to each other and unwilling to make a public show. We solved that problem at the 40th anniversary meeting with an innovation which I think Joe Sack suggested. From the chair I closed the meeting unusually early at 9.30 pm. We then served refreshments. An hour later, despite the proximity of the pub, several dozen people were still engaged in fervent discussions in little knots around each of the Party members. Johnny stayed with us and went from group to group, adding his weight to the appeal. Six people joined the Party. It was at about this time that Bill Alexander, Communist Party assistant general secretary, asked me if I’d consider working full-time for the Party. It was an honour and I’m sure I would have enjoyed it, but the kids were still young, Liz was planning to study for a qualification, so I told Bill I was giving the family top priority.
Dissenting views For the ten years I was in Crawley most of the active members had no quarrel with the policies that came down from Party centre. But some of us did have doubts about certain aspects of the Party’s national style of work. The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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Two things in particular bothered us. The first was the frequent failure to link the struggle on immediate issues with the perspective of advance to socialism. It was quite common for a national speaker at a public meeting to talk at length – usually with wit and wisdom – on the questions of the hour, and then to add a sort of coda appealing for new members. But why, we asked, should anyone take the serious step of joining the CP just to fight on immediate issues? In one of my election addresses, likely to be read by more people than most party propaganda, we included a whole page on the socialist perspective. When I asked Reuben Falber, the CP’s national election agent, what he thought of it, all he said was: “I don’t suppose it got you any votes!” Our other worry was about a sort of voluntarism on the part of full-time Party workers, a failure to distinguish objective and subjective factors affecting the size and influence of the Party. Take recruiting. It was often implied that the failure to build a bigger Party was mainly due to our own shortcomings. In countering this we pointed out that it might be our fault The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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that the branch didn’t have 10 more members, but nothing we could do in the short run would get us 50 more members! Some historians of the Party imply that if only the CP had had a different strategy or a different culture it could have been significantly more influential. This is rubbish. The reasons for the comparative weakness of the Communist Party lie deep in the history of British capitalism and the labour movement. It seems likely though that a genuine socialist party in any capitalist country will be – and in a sense should be – marginal to the so-called mainstream (i.e. parliamentary politics) until a revolutionary situation is at hand. This is not a matter for concern so long as the Party is not also on the margins of the grass roots organisations of the labour movement; in them the CP has nearly always had a significant influence, if as yet not a decisive one.
Party culture There are just a few things worth adding to the story of my ten years in Crawley. We were delighted when, after many fruitless discussions, we were able to set up a branch of the Young Communist League. There was plenty of social activity among Party members, and to a lesser extent with Labour Party and CND members. We did a lot of rough singing together; one of my most vivid memories is of Carmel Paton, a member of the branch, and sister of Dominic, Brian and Brendan Behan, singing that poignant ballad of the Irish struggle Kevin Barry. There were outings to London and Brighton, sometimes to political rallies or demonstrations, sometimes to a theatre or concert hall. I recall especially seeing Willis Hall’s play The Long and the Short and the Tall. We went to the Sussex district summer party in a comrade’s lovely garden near Ringmer. I know our son Dan shares my memory of John Hasted sitting by the pond softly singing with his guitar. And there was our annual Daily Worker Bazaar, itself a great social occasion, preceded by weeks of work producing toys and garments. Ted and Enid turned the working parties at their home into social occasions too. The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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In February/March 1960 I kept a branch secretary’s diary for four typical weeks. Except for two days when the whole family relaxed on the Sussex coast I was doing Party work every evening and part of every weekend. During those four weeks I saw half of our 70 members, some of them several times – at meetings, in their homes, or at our home. I was impressed by the variety of things they were doing to further the cause, and conscious that most of their activities would have been impossible without strong local and national frameworks. I prepared political statements for branch committee and branch meetings; put together and typed the monthly Branch News, took it to the comrade who ran it off on a duplicator, collected it and took copies to several distributors; delivered the Saturday Daily Worker to regular readers in Northgate, with other comrades canvassed for new readers, and stood twice with the paper in the town square because Dave Hook was sick (I sold only one copy!); discussed with key comrades the work of our members in the Trades Council and the Tenants’ Association; listened to the district secretary’s pleas for more money from Crawley, and tried to inspire our rather half-hearted treasurer; had the honour of marching behind Tennyson Makiwane in an Anti-Apartheid poster parade to publicise the boycott of South African goods; and joined 41 others in a full coach to a magnificent Daily Worker 30th birthday celebration at the Albert Hall, where for the second time I had the wonderful experience of hearing Paul Robeson in the flesh. All this activity was carried out without a car or a telephone – very few households in Crawley had either at that time. I cycled for miles in every kind of weather along the seemly but rather monotonous roads of the new town. Of course I was doing too much; I enjoyed it – but the family suffered. No doubt the branch would have been stronger if the organisational and political work I did had been shared among a number of comrades. I tried to delegate tasks, with limited success. I was never as good as Ted Rogers at getting other people to do things! But let’s face it: most voluntary bodies are run by a few enthusiasts for a majority of passive members. The CP should be different – and to some extent it was: a lot of The Crawley Communist Party in the 1950s
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our members were taking continuous action to influence their workmates and neighbours in a way I couldn’t emulate. In March 1962 Marxism Today published my article “Lessons of the New Towns”. But by that time I was in Ghana, well into a new phase of my life.
Public sources used Ted Rogers Journeyman Plus 80 (2003) John Green Ken Sprague - People’s Artist Hawthorn Press (2001) John Peck The Story of a British Communist J H Peck undated (c. 1998)
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