Daily Worker and labour Monthly

Angela
The phone rang. It was Angela Tuckett, acting editor of "Labour Monthly", asking if she could meet up with me for a chat. Her reputation was awesome. i could not imagine what she wanted from me - I was intrigued.
"Eccentric" was the usual description of Angela. She was renowned for her playig of the concertina. She and her squeeze box were present on every CND march, on every peace demonstration and at every trades union conference. Stories were told of her amorous dalliances and of her wild youth, but all agreed that her political record was more than admirable. In the thirties she had organised welcoming committees to provide foor and accommodation for the unemployed workers on their march up to London. She had also helped to buld up Unity Theatre in Bristol with her sister Joan. But perhaps Angela was most famous for playing hockey - or not playing it I should say. She had been chosen to play in England's Olympic hockey team but refused to compete at the nazi Olympics in Berlin 1936, leading her team in walking off the field. When we met and she informed me that it was being suggested I should work on Labour Monthly as her editorial assistant, I was too excited by the thought to ask all the questions that later flooded into my mind. Nor did I concern myself immediately with the effect it might have on th Daily Worker, where I was working at the time. I just presumed that Palme Dutt, chair of the British Communist Party as well as Editor of Labour Monthly, had cleared such a move with both the Party and the paper.
I went into the office of David Ainley, the paper's administrative head, to discuss leaving. He sat stonily silent as i told him my news, and then, without even loking up, he said "Never forget that even a cleaner at the Daily Worker does a more important job for the party than any luminary at Labour Monthly." But the party did agree that i should make the move.
MEET THE BOARD
Angela was a great story teller and as we drove each month to the printers she had me as a captive audience. She regaled me with stories of dancing through the streets and colleges of Oxford naked beneath her fur coat. She had seemingly always mixed pleasure with business. She taught me all the tricks of the trade: how to sub the articles, how to lay out the magazine, how to deal with the printers, and it was she who instructed me in how to get my man when we wanted an interview with a trade union leader at conference. "Stand outside the gents lavatory" she told me. "That's the one place they have to go to. They'll promise you anything in their desperatio to get inside quickly." Many an embarrassing hour I stood outside those doors.
On my first day at Labour Monthly Angela warned me that Raji Palme Dutt, the Editor, would never let anyone beyond the front door of his flat. His privacy was sacrosanct, and he defended it against all comers. "Don't think he'll let you in when you go to collect the manuscript of his "Notes of the month", she warned. "He may not even open the door. Sometimes he pushes the pages through the letter box to you." And that was true at first.
Even at the Board meetings he hardly ever glanced in my direction. None of them paid me much attention at first. But what a lot I learned by just sitting there listening to them - Palme Dutt, Robin Page Arnot, Andrew Rothstein, Ivor Montagu, Steve Boddington, Will Paynter and other trade union leaders.It was like a living history lesson listening to them reminiscing about past political events. They made the General strike come alive for me, telling how they brought out the bulletin and distributed it. I heard stories of their meetings with such legendary figures as Lenin, Stali and Dimitrov. They would swap tales of how they smuggled things in and out when they were serving their terms of imprisonment for one political reason or another. They told, too, of strolls in the gardens of Sidney and Beatrice Webb's house with George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Ivor Montagu would tell us hi adventures organising ping-pog matches around the world and then would switch easily from that into an account of film-making with Eisenstein.
Such stories were the preamble before we started on the business of the day. They were like the curtain raisers for the main event. Raji would give a resume of the current political scene to help us decide on the themes of the articles for the magazine that month.
Gradually I won Raji's confidence and the door of his flat was opened to me. He even invited me into the inner sanctum, his book-lined study, and I began to know him not just as a leading comrade but also as a vulnerable human being. Wherever he went on his many journeys abroad he sent me a postcard, but his spindly writing was so bad I could hardly make out the messages.
Once he invited me out to dinner and a trip to the theatre to see Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession". Over dinner he told me stories of his courtship of Salme, his wife. Salme's family had a country estate in Finland, carved out of the woods around. He told me of tea on the lawns in sunny weather, of bears wandering in fro the woods, attracted by the smell of honey on the tea table, and how they would sway from side to side just as if they were dancing to some tune they could hear.
Raji came to share Christmas lunch with my family and enjoyed a game of scrabble with us. Then for his 70th birthday I organised a huge party with an iced cake, candles and all. But soon after the Party asked me to return to the Daily Worker as its Fund organiser, replacing Barbara Niven, just as it was changing its name to The Morning Star. On this occasion, contrary to my eperience when i first left the Daily Worker for the Labour Monthly, the move was made amicably.
Around that time Raji's health began to deteriorate rapidly. He often went off to a sanitorium just outside Moscow to recuperate. These trips were paid for out of the royalties that accrued through the sales of his books in the USSR, and he always brought me back a little present, assuring me that the royalties had to be used up.
Even though I disagreed with him on many things, I was very fond of him, and it seemed he was of me. When he died he left me a bequest of £50 in his will. That was great wealth to me in those days.
My work at Labour Monthly involved commissioning, chasing up and editing articles. I also had to do all the publicity, publih special booklets, solicit advertising and gain support for the journal from the trade union movement.
I became a familiar figure at trade union conferences, wheedling donations out of the harrassed members. many of the leading members of the movement took me under their protective wings. Mick McGahey of the Scottish miners used to invite me to join his table at the Mayor's reception at the TUC, where drinks flowed freely, though by no means free. Their drinks kitty was often larger than my whole week's salary.
Bert Ramelson, industrial organiser of the Communist Party introduced me to all the leading trade unionists and to foreign delegates attending the conferences. The Russians were always clustered around Bert, who spoke their language, and they would keep his glass topped up with vodka which they could handle better than poor Bert. Once, at Blackpool, Gordon McLennan came over to me and suggested I get Bert away from the Russians and back to his hotel in a taxi, before he said or did anything he would regret the next day.
Bert was a large man and I found it rather difficult holding him up unti the cab came. It felt a little like being in a Laurel and Hardy film - every time I propped him up he would gradually slide down again. What impressed me, however, was that when eventually I did get him back to his hotel, he remembered to phone home to assure his wife all was well.
Another of my duties was to organise gatherings of the great and wealthy, ostensibly to celebrate the journal's anniversaires, but actually to raise funds. People frm every branch of cultural and political life came to pay homage to Palme Dutt and the journal from james Aldridge, novelist, to Malcolm Muggeridge, broadcaster; Allan Bush, coposer, to Lee Chadwick, artist; MPs and trade unions, doctors and lawyers, as well a the loyal readers from every walk of life.
What I am most proud of in my time at Labour Monthly is persuading Raji to open the pages of the journal to uncensored debate on the arts. I gathered together an editorial group for the new section to be called "The Arts Today". They came from television, film, sculpture, painting, music and poetry and they selected Stuart Douglas as editor. The section, begun in 1967, was to be readable, factual and analytical and it attempted to dig deeper into the relationships between the artist, their subject matter, their achievement, and their contribution to society. Raji was very anxious about it for fear that an anti-Party te might creep into the pages, yet he agreed to write in his Notes of the Month that whilst all in the editorial group were not marxists, "no attempt wil be made to impose formulas from without or limit the judgement of theme and treatment by those contributing ...Nowhere more than in the field of the creative arts is broad co-operation and wide freedom of epression essential. The Muses can ever be constrained; they need to follow their inspiration, if they are to give of their best."
Despite lots of arguments and minor skirmishes, I kept Raji at bay, and had a very interesting time in discussion with all the artists. But then I left the Journal in November of that year. The irony was that the Party wanted me to take over Barbara niven's job at the "Morning star". I was back to square one I giggled to myself at the thought of David Ainley having to welcoe me back to the paper after what he said when I left.