1. 20th of March 1977. This is the first tape of some reminiscences of mine, since 1977 marks 30 years as a Trotskyist and 30 years of political activity. However, my political activity, although I say 30 years, actually extends beyond 1947, back to earlier than that date.
2. But before I say anything about that, I think I have to say something, at least some sketch of my own personal background. My mother and father, were both working-class people. On my mother's side, the family was Irish. My mother's maiden name was Colley and my grandfather came from County Meath. I'm not sure when he came or particularly what he did, I only know that at some point he worked for the Birmingham Corporation. Birmingham, of course, being where I was born and raised. On my father's side, his father, my grandfather Tarbuck, had been a regular soldier and had been a colour sergeant in a cavalry regiment, and had fought in the Boer War. My own recollections of him are as a very upright, tall, white-haired man with a great long 'Kitchener' moustache, white. But he died some time in the 1930s and my recollections of him are vague, to say the least. However, as I said, my father and mother were both working-class, and my mother went out to work before the war: cleaning, she was a char woman. And my father had a job at a small factory in the centre of Birmingham, of lithographer, plate-makers. He was in charge of the boiler room, and general handyman for the factory. Later on, he left there and became caretaker of two blocks of flats privately owned, which in those days were considered to be luxury flats.
3. So that although my parents were working-class, at a fairly early age, I came into contact with people of middle and upper-class standing. And I think, seeing my father in many ways being so subservient to these people, touching his hat, and running around after their every wish, inspired in me a dislike and a distrust of these type of people. Coupled with this, as I got older, at school, I became more and more interested in history. And when I was about 12 or 13, I began reading very widely, quite indiscriminately, in history books: ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece. And this led me on to more modern history. I began then reading the history of the 19th century, Germany and particularly Spain. And I read a whole series of books on Spain when I was 13 and coming up to 14, so that by the time I left school when I was 14 I had a fair knowledge of history, modern history beyond which most of my contemporaries would have, [in the] sense that amongst the people are mixed with at my school I was the only one who took this passionate interest in history.
4. When I left school and became a butcher. I'd started work part time when I was 13, and I left early in 1944, because I was 14 in February of 1944, and began work for a pound a week as a butcher. And during this period, when I'd just left school when I was 14, I remember quite vividly taking out Trotsky's 'Revolution Betrayed' from my local library and reading it. And reading Trotsky's 'Revolution Betrayed' at that point cleared up a whole lot of problems that I'd felt in reading various accounts of what had happened in Spain during the Civil War. And although it'd be wrong to say I became a Trotskyist at that stage, or even understood most of what Trotsky had written, I think I understood enough to understand the role of the Communist Party in Spain, and try to relate it to the role of the Communist Party here in Britain. Although at that time, I'd had no contact at all with the Communist Party or in fact any other political party. However, I still carried on my reading. Again, as I say, it was quite indiscriminate. Just reading, reading, reading.
5. And then, of course, came the end of the war in 1945, and with it the general election, where, I think to Attlee's surprise, and quite a number of other people's surprise, the Labour Party was swept into office with a huge majority. And I can well remember the feeling of the time of intense expectation. It's difficult to describe it other than that, but it just seemed to me that everyone's hopes and expectations had been raised to an incredibly high degree by the defeat of Germany and fascism and then Japan, and the return of a Labour government with its programme 'Let us face the future', promising various reforms and nationalisations. And during that early period, I remember quite vividly my own feelings on this matter of, as it were, daily waiting to see what dramatic acts the Labour government was going to take. Since I'd got a rather romanticised view of politics, I suppose I was still thinking at that stage in terms of a, if not a repeat of 1917 in Russia, at least some sort of analogous acts being taken that would clearly mark off this Labour government from the previous Tory and then wartime coalition government. And it was during this period that I came in contact with the Labour Party League of Youth, and some time in 1945, I joined the Labour League of Youth in the Ladywood branch in Birmingham. And then, as the result of activities there and meeting various people, I transferred from the Ladywood branch to the Rotten Park branch of the Labour League of Youth, that was Rotten Park ward Labour Party's League of Youth
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6. And there I associated quite closely with someone called Bob Scott, who was several years older than myself, he was probably 20, 21, something like that, as against my being, what? 15 or 16 at the time. And amongst the other people that I remember from then, there was a girl named Sylvia Murray, and Rhoda Guest, who I subsequently married. And we formed the sort of inner core of the Rotten Park Labour League of Youth and began producing a duplicated paper, which we called simply 'Socialist'. And [in] which we began attacking the policies of the Labour government for not taking active measures in a socialist direction as we considered them. Of course, it was all on a very juvenile level. And to a certain extent, I think the adult members of the Labour Party tended to patronise us, almost patting us on the head and expecting us to get over these wild ideas that we had of the party, the Labour Party, actually beginning to operate as the governing party in the country. And what I mean by this is that I think we all felt that somehow or other, and we weren't quite clear about this, that since there was this Labour government in power, each of the local party associations should start itself being an organ of power. And yet, of course, the machine carried on. Considering that we were actually in a bourgeois parliamentary democracy, of course, our ideas were a fantasy. Nevertheless, the discrepancy between our ideas and the actuality of the Labour government and the lack of any direct access of the rank and file members of the party to, to the power structure, as I say, drew us along this road of creating this paper, which we called 'Socialist', which we began circulating fairly widely amongst the Leagues of Youth which we could get in touch with in Birmingham.
7. And at that point, we came in contact with a man named Jimmy McKee or McKay, who was a member of the ILP [Independent Labour Party] and had actually put up for Rotten Park ward in the, I think it was the November 1946 municipal elections, since municipal elections were still held in November in those days. And we came in contact with him and we had quite long discussions with Jimmy McKee or McKay (pronounce it which way you like) on a whole series of questions relating to socialism and socialist policy and so on. And I think this helped to develop us politically, it clarified some of our own ideas. And then, late in 1946 - I can't precisely date it, all I know [is] that it was in the winter months of 1946, so that must be have been November or December, I would think - there was a meeting held by the Revolutionary Communist Party in the ILP rooms in the centre of Birmingham in John Bright Street. And I remember going along and listening to the speaker, and the speaker was Bill Hunter. I honestly can't remember what he was talking about now, but what I did know after that meeting was, and listening to Bill Hunter during the discussion - the talk and the subsequent discussion - is that I felt I'd found some people who I could identify with and seemed to have the sort of policies and views in a much more rounded, developed, sophisticated form than I had attempted to formulate, first on my own and then in discussions in our Labour League of Youth. And after the meeting, I approached Bill Hunter and had a discussion, short discussion with him. He took my name and address and he sent me some of the RCP’s literature and including a pamphlet of Trotsky's speech that he made in Copenhagen. And I again read all this quite avidly and became a regular contact of the RCP, going along to various discussion meetings held in Birmingham.
8. And then, early in 1947, a comrade named Carl Westwood came up from London, and I spent the whole evening with Carl Westwood and another comrade named Bill Ainsworth, who I'll come to later, at Bill Ainsworth's house. And as a result of this discussion, I decided to apply for membership of the RCP, and this I did at that point. And it was shortly afterwards that I was accepted as a member of the RCP. I can't precisely date this but, if my memory serves me right, in the files at Warwick, there's a file of 'Party Organiser' put out by the RCP where it does mention at some point in the report from the Birmingham branch that there had been two young comrades recruited during a certain period and I certainly was one of them. And I think the other member recruited that time was actually Rhoda, Rhoda Guest. Certainly she was in the RCP with me, and I actually can't remember at this point whether we joined simultaneously or not. I have no recollection of her being at that meeting with me with Carl Westwood, so whether she applied to join afterwards, after I had applied to join, or not I'm not sure. I don't think at that time we were actually going out together. I mean, in the sense of we weren't - I wasn't her boyfriend and she wasn't my girlfriend. [As a] matter of fact, I think I was still more attached to Sylvia Murray. Nevertheless, we did become members of the RCP, and basically as a result of discussions with Bill Hunter, comrades like Bill Ainsworth, and ultimately, the final session with Westwood. Now Westwood was actually, as I found out when I joined the party, actually a member of the Labour Party and actually was a leading member of the RCP's Labour Party fraction. But at the same time, as again I found out when I joined the RCP, there was an entryist faction led by Gerry Healy and John Lawrence. Westwood was not a member of that fraction. In fact, he was opposed to total entry but supported fraction work inside the Labour Party on behalf of the open RCP.
9. After this period when Rhoda and I joined the RCP, we carried on our membership of the Labour Party and the Labour League of Youth for some time, doing fraction work inside the youth organisation. I think we bought out further issues of this paper, 'Socialist', and circulated them as widely as possible in the West Midlands because I have memories of attending meetings of the West Midlands Regional Council of the Labour League of Youth, where we had quite bitter arguments with right-wingers at that stage. And if my memory serves me correctly, it was during this period that I first met Walter Kendall, who was also active in the Labour League of Youth, and he must have been put in touch with me through our people in the Labour Party, since I remember him coming to my mother and father's flat and having quite a long discussion with him about policy inside the Labour League of Youth. Now, at some point it was decided that Rhoda and I would actually resign from the Labour Party, which by the time we did we were very glad to, since we were both fed up with being members of the RCP and still being members of the Labour Party. Given our youth and our rather romanticised idea of politics, we were straining at the leash to declare ourselves openly as revolutionaries. And I remember we did this in a letter of resignation to the local Labour Party and then became full and open members of the RCP.
10. And during this period, I had joined what was then the National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers, NUDAW, which subsequently became USDAW, Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers. And I joined the same branch as a comrade named Percy Downey was in, and either at the same time or very shortly afterwards, comrade Peter Morgan appeared in Birmingham, and he joined the same branch. And when the branch of the union had its annual general meeting, the three of us were actually elected as delegates to the local trades council, the Birmingham Trades Council. So that by the time I was 17, I was actively engaged in trade union affairs at the Birmingham Trades Council. And we had from the RCP branch Percy Downey, myself, Peter Morgan, and I think Bill Ainsworth, and a comrade named Gerry Curran, which gave us quite a sizable little fraction considering our overall strength in Birmingham, which was probably about 10 members at that time. And we operated quite effectively as a fraction inside the Birmingham Trades Council, putting our position on various issues, [as] they came before the Council.
11. And during this period, apart from branch meetings, of course, where we held various discussions, there was paper-selling at all public meetings, slogan-painting. At this time - 47, 48 - the fascists had made their reappearance in London, and the RCP mounted a national campaign against them, and we went about this in Birmingham by whitewashing slogans, on various walls, and so on. I was actually caught by the police one night. And I think because [of] my age, they didn't take it too seriously because I was on my own at that time. And all that happened to me, I had to go down to the local police station [and] present my identity card, where and when I'd done this, because I hadn't got it on me at the particular time. When I'd done this, the sergeant gave me ticking off for being so silly and told me not to do it again. When identity cards were abolished, I'm not sure I think it was about 1950, but everyone was still legally bound to produce an identity card even though the war was over. And they obviously used this as a - this technicality to get me down there to try and browbeat me. But my memory is that they didn't particularly browbeat me, in fact they just treated it as more of a youthful indiscretion. So that was my first brush with the police.
12. At that time, of course, the Communist Party was probably still quite large, although it had lost members since the war. But during the war, it had grown to about 60,000 members. And they had regular public meetings. I remember one meeting in the Birmingham Town Hall where Harry Pollitt had come to speak, I think to talk about his new book that he'd just written, 'The Way Ahead', and we had a maximum turnout of branch members. And there must have been about 10 or 11 of us selling the 'Socialist Appeal' outside this meeting, both before and after the meeting. This obviously made quite an impact on the CP because some time later I made the acquaintance, or Rhoda and I made the acquaintance, of another couple, Nan and Joe Harrison, and Joe was district secretary the YCL [Young Communist League] at that time, and he told me he thought that the RCP must have had about 50 members in Birmingham, because of the big turnout we could always have with paper-selling at meetings and our interventions and the membership that we had on the Trades Council and so on. Of course, it was completely exaggerated because nearly every member of the RCP was an activist. We carried very few card-carrying members. I think the only two real card-carrying members at that stage would be Percy Downey and his wife, Marjorie, and Bill Ainsworth's wife, Gwen. They never actually participated much in public activities such as paper-selling, although they attended the occasional branch meeting, and if the party put on a public meeting, and so on, they would come and give support to fill out the numbers of the audience and so on, but apart from that they didn't take much interest or didn't take much part in the actual politics. But apart from that, those two people, every other member of the party branch was active, and we had regular weekly branch meetings where the following week's paper-selling routine was mapped out, contacts would be met and discussed, and [at] each branch meeting there would be a report on them. And generally, various public meetings and forums were held at that time by the RCP in Birmingham.
13. And I remember that during that year, there was a train going round the country with an exhibition on it relating to atomic energy. And the party branch in Birmingham drew up a leaflet, and we had a team outside the atomic energy exhibition, which was I think, if remember right, it was Snow Hill Station, Birmingham - which I think is now closed - distributing these leaflets to people as they were going in, putting our opposition to the use of atomic weapons. So that, although of course at a later stage in the 50s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament became a mass campaign, I think it can be truthfully said that, nationally and locally, that the RCP, the Trotskyists, were the first people to take up this issue of atomic weapons and campaign against them.
14. Now, I mentioned earlier that when I came into the party, I found out there was an entryist faction led by Healy and Lawrence. And my own recollection is that at that point, there were only a couple of people actually in Birmingham, who supported the Minority point of view. I think that was Bill Pickett and, I'm not sure, maybe Joe Davis was there at that time, I honestly can't remember. But there was a rather comical episode when I first met Gerry Healy. The Birmingham branch had started organising fairly regular Sunday afternoon forums, where we invited contacts along for discussion. Someone would speak, a comrade would speak on a particular topic, and then there'd be general discussion. And this one particular Sunday afternoon, we turned up to the place where we were having the meeting, which was in the centre of Birmingham, actually in the Peace Pledge Union, the pacifist organisation's headquarters. We used to rent their small back room for these meetings. Anyway, we were all turned up for this meeting, and there was only one non-party member present. And we decided to go ahead with the meeting, so we went - a comrade gave his speech, I think it was Bill Ainsworth, I can't remember what he was talking about. And he gave his speech and then we asked for discussion and one or two of us made our contributions, trying to stimulate this one particular contact who none of us knew, he was a new contact to us. And then after a short time, the meeting came to a close. And then this short, balding man in a rather grubby raincoat announced that he was Gerry Healy. So we'd been through the whole bloody charade of having this public meeting, this forum for what we thought was a new contact, and it turned out to be Gerry Healy, who'd come to talk to the branch on the Minority's line on entry into the Labour Party, which we subsequently had the discussion with him on. But we all rather fell about laughing afterwards, because of the way we'd actually gone through this whole charade. I don't think Healy was particularly amused. I can't remember him being amused at that time. And anyway, that was my first introduction to Gerry Healy.
15. There’s various interesting sidelights on both the RCP and the labour movement generally at this period. First of all, the RCP nationally had been producing a German language newspaper for distribution amongst German prisoners of war, and one of our comrades, Bill Ainsworth, was arrested by the police for selling or giving copies of this newspaper, I think it was called 'Solidaritat', to German prisoners of war in the centre of Birmingham. Of course, there was still, even in 1947, there was still quite a large number of German prisoners of war in England at that time. And he was subsequently taken up before the magistrates and fined for distributing this paper. Also, members of the ILP made contact with the German prisoners of war, and there was one member of the ILP, a woman named Mrs. Jones, woman in her 40s or early 50s, an old ILP stalwart, old working-class woman, who had quite large numbers of these German prisoners of war round to her house regularly on the weekend when they didn't have to work. And we from the RCP used to go along to these meetings and talk to the German prisoners of war as best we could about politics and about Nazism and the reconstruction of Germany and so on, all the problems that were sort of turning over in people's minds at the time. And, interestingly enough, there was never any sort of factional or sectarian attitude taken either by the RCP or the ILP as regards these meetings, although they were arranged by an ILP member, Mrs. Jones, there was never any thought of excluding us because we weren't members of the ILP, but we were equally welcomed as other members of the RCP.
16. And another illustration of this sort of thing was that, some time in 47, we had passed on to us from other members of the RCP, a German comrade named Johnny, who was a young comrade, and quite where he came from, I was never sure of, but he was in the country illegally. And this was the sort of cooperation that we had amongst the left groups at that time. I remember, we in the RCP contacted a member of the SPGB [Socialist Party of Great Britain] who found him a place to live. A member of the ILP gave Johnny his National Insurance cards so he could actually get a job, because this guy actually was self-employed, he used to have a stall on the market in Birmingham so he didn't need to have cards himself, or rather, he didn't need to show them to an employer. So that we were able to fix this lad Johnny up with cards and eventually he got a job and digs, and he stayed in Birmingham, if my memory serves me right, for about 12 months before he moved on. Whatever became of him later on, I'm really not sure, but the point is that both the SPGB and the ILP gave us as members of the RCP all the assistance they could in finding this guy a means of establishing himself in Birmingham. And there was this sort of general level of cooperation despite our obvious political differences. So that even these sort of comradely attitude[s] towards each other, not only extended towards members of our own party, the RCP, but it went beyond the confines of the party and was extended to the left generally.
17. During this period, there was also a café run by an ILPer, and it was always referred to as Dan's Café. Dan who, I can't remember, but it was in the centre of Birmingham, up an alleyway, a very narrow alleyway. And it was a popular gathering place for people on the left: ILP, SPGB, some anarchists, the RCP, members of the Labour Party. We all tended to drift in there and eat toast and drink tea after meetings and so on, so that you could find, you could see quite a cross-section of the Birmingham labour movement in this café. I remember people like Woodrow Wyatt used to come into there; he was a Labour MP at that period. And there were always heated discussions going on on various political issues in the front room, and it was sort of tacitly agreed that the backroom was a quiet room.
I mean, there was no rule about this; it was just sort of tacitly agreed between users of the café, you could carry on your discussions in the front room, but there was a back room where if you wanted to be quiet and just have a private conversation with somebody that's where you went, or to read a newspaper and so on. And there were various journals on sale at Dan’s Café; I know we always left a bundle of ‘Socialist Appeals’ there and ‘Workers’ International News’ when it came out.
18. Another person I remember frequenting this café is Dennis Howell, who at this moment in time he's now Minister of Sport. I didn't think much of him then and I certainly don't think much of him now. I remember at that period one of the big economic problems for Britain was the shortage of dollars. It was an ever-constant point of discussion in the newspapers, this problem of the shortage of dollars to buy goods from America with. And Howell came out with the classic statement of, “Oh well, when we run out of dollars, we'll have to just exchange goods with them.” Well, I'll leave it to you to figure out what sort of a man that could make that sort of statement. He was at that period, if I remember right, on the Birmingham City Council as a Labour councillor, and subsequently became the secretary of the group and then leader of the group on the Birmingham Labour-controlled council. And of course then moved on to become an MP.
19. There were various people who [indistinct] meeting there. The Communist Party members used to come in there as well. So that it was a general gathering place, and when it closed down nothing ever really took its place.
And I think it was a sort of symptom of the pre-war labour movement where people were very short of money, and a place where you could buy a cup of tea for a penny, or tuppence, and a slice of toast, and find congenial company, was something that was probably prevalent throughout most working-class areas where there were various socialist organisations in operation. Certainly, I don't think Dan’s Café was peculiar to Birmingham in that sense. I think it could be duplicated up and down the country.
20. [If] my memory serves me rightly, I attended the 1947 RCP national congress, not as a delegate but as an observer. And this was the 1947 congress where, eventually, the Minority after that were allowed to enter the Labour Party as a separate organisation. And my memory off the RCP conference of that year is, first of all, that was the first time I saw John Lawrence, who spoke for the Minority. And what impressed me about Lawrence was his excellent speaking style and his obviously [obvious] ability as a speaker and generally politically. And I was thinking that - I know my main thought at that congress was it was a pity he was in the Minority. And that conference was also the first time I ever saw Michel Pablo. Pablo spoke in French and there had to be someone to translate his remarks. I remember he aroused quite a lot of hostility on the part of the Majority faction delegates because, at this conference, the Majority leadership had put down a long resolution, a document they’d called 'The tendency towards statification', which seemed to be moving in the direction of defining the Soviet Union either as a state capitalist regime or a bureaucratic collectivist state regime. And during Pablo’s speech, he referred to this, and warned about the tendency towards Schachtmanism that he could see in this document. And this provoked a howl of anger, and cries of “no!” and “rubbish!” from the Majority delegates. So that that was the first encounter with Pablo I had, and I wasn't to see him again for well over 10 years.
21. Subsequently, I should point out that the RCP Majority actually printed a rectification to this document, in the pages of 'Socialist Appeal', where they obviously had been moving in [the] direction towards state capitalism and had drawn back. And one wonders how far Tony Cliff was pushed along the path to state capitalism, since he was a part of the leadership at that time, and I think had been commissioned to write material on this. There's a story I know, and it may be apocryphal, I really can't vouch for its authenticity, that Cliff went into the British Museum to look up material to argue against the theory of state capitalism and came out a convinced state capitalist. And the other version of this story, which I say maybe apocryphal, is that he was sent into the British Museum by the Majority leadership - Haston and company - to provide material for the basis of their move towards state capitalism, but by the time he arrived out with his document completed, they’d changed their mind and swung back again to a workers’ statist position, and left him as it were holding the bag. Neither of these versions may be true, of course, but it's certainly true that in some period in 1947 the Majority leadership were making tentative moves towards some ideas of bureaucratic collectivism or state capitalism . . .
