From FB page of Spokesman the publishing imprint of the Bertrand
Russell Peace Foundation
Ernie Tate, who died at home in Canada on 5 February 2021, had a
close-up view of the Russell Foundation during the 1960s, whilst
Bertrand Russell was still alive. Ernie recounted his experiences during
those eventful years in his 2014 memoir, reviewed in The Spokesman
journal by Tony Simpson (see below). In 2018, Tony met with Ernie and
Jess MacKenzie, Ernie’s partner since the ‘60s, whilst attending the
annual meeting of the Bertrand Russell Society at McMaster University,
Ontario, which holds the Bertrand Russell Archives.
***
Ernest Tate, Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s & 60s, Volume 1, Canada
1955-1965, Volume 2, Britain 1965-1970, Resistance Books, 2014, Volume 1
ISBN 9780902869691, £9, Volume 2 paperback ISBN 9780902869608, £13
Ernie Tate’s readable memoir came as something of a revelation, after 30
plus years working at the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. For
example, there’s a photograph of Stephen Hawking, camera hung round neck
and walking with sticks, alongside Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave at the
head of the Vietnam demonstration in London en route for the US Embassy
at Grosvenor Square, on 17 March 1968. Hawking was, and perhaps still
is, a great fan of Bertrand Russell. But Tate also has much to tell us
about Nottingham’s ‘International Group’ and the considerable
contribution made by people from this small city in the English
Midlands, particularly Ken Coates and Pat Jordan, and how Ken came to
work with Bertrand Russell and the Peace Foundation.
‘I arrived in London on my new assignment to help the Fourth
International in the autumn of 1965,’ writes Tate, who had travelled
from Canada. He soon journeyed north to meet the Nottingham group,
publishers of The Week, ‘a mimeographed socialist weekly co-edited by
Robin Blackburn and Ken Coates that took its name from a radical weekly
founded during the Spanish Civil War by the Daily Worker correspondent
in Spain, Claude Cockburn’. Pat Jordan is acknowledged as a ‘modest,
soft spoken man who was mainly responsible for the production of The
Week,’ launched in 1963, which circulated in left trade union and left
Labour Party circles, ‘with a coverage of Third World struggles greater
than any other British left journal’.
Tate traces the development of the Nottingham group in some detail from
1965. His arrival coincided with Ken Coates’ first expulsion from the
Labour Party in November that year under ‘the pretext of his writings in
Briefing at the Labour Party’s Annual Conferences, where he had sharply
criticised the [Wilson] Labour government’s failures on the economy and
immigration and Vietnam ...’ (Ken was summarily expelled a second time,
in early 1999, whilst he was an elected Member of the European
Parliament, for opposing Tony Blair’s imposition of ‘closed lists’ of
candidates for that year’s European elections.) Back in the ’60s, Ken
campaigned for his readmission to the Labour Party throughout the five-
year duration of Tate’s stay in Britain: meanwhile, Ken ‘...
concentrated his efforts on developing a “workers control campaign” and
working with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation’.
In September 1965, Bertrand Russell had publicly announced his support
for The Week; on the front cover of the issue dated 23 September 1965,
his name appears near the end of the list of sponsors, after Eric Varley
MP and before the activist and writer, Malcolm Caldwell. Around this
time, a delegation from the Russell Foundation, ‘led by Russell’s
secretary, Ralph Schoenman, headed up to Nottingham to discuss
co-operation in opposing the [Vietnam] war. Schoenman invited Ken to
take a full-time position with the Foundation but Ken initially
declined, on the advice of Ernest Mandel’. (Characteristically, this
account is carefully referenced to letters in Mandel’s archive at the
International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.) Not long after,
Ken accepted the invitation to join the Foundation, which ultimately led
to the location of its offices in Nottingham.
Tate recounts in absorbing detail the history of the early years of the
Foundation. He traces the influence of developments in North America on
the gathering protests against the Vietnam war in Britain, on which he,
Schoenman, Ken and others worked closely. He records the break between
Russell and Schoenman, which came to a head in 1969. The Vietnam
Solidarity Campaign and the International Marxist Group, which expelled
Ken Coates in 1967, figure centrally. As an appendix, Tate reprints the
Metropolitan Police Special Branch redacted report on the Vietnam
Solidarity Campaign ‘Autumn Offensive’ of 1968; part of a ‘three inch
thick file’ obtained by journalists Solomon Hughes and Paul Mason.
Dated September 1968, the Special Branch report post-dates the sessions
of the International War Crimes Tribunal founded by Bertrand Russell to
‘prevent the crime of silence’ over US criminal conduct in Vietnam. Tate
shines a revealing light on the difficult and disputatious history of
the Tribunal; in the circumstances, it is striking that the Tribunal
accomplished so much and established a useful precedent of civil
initiative, which continues to be invoked.
In volume 2, Tate goes on to chronicle his experiences in the
International Marxist Group in Britain, and engagement with struggles in
South America, particularly in Argentina. Volume 1 of Revolutionary
Activism covers the years 1955 to 1965 which the author spent in Canada,
where he went ‘as a working-class immigrant from Northern Ireland,’
according to the Publisher’s Foreword.
Revolutionary Activism Volume 2 is, as the publishers claim, an
important contribution to the history of the Left in Britain, and indeed
more widely. It strikes many chords with those of us who have spent
decades working at the Russell Foundation in Nottingham as we uncover
our own history.
Tony Simpson
Spokesman 127
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