Life in the Party

left
typical column in Daily Worker by Zelda Curtis, appealing for money for the communist daily paper
Right - Zelda and young Zelda Brown in Barcelona - the connections with the Brown family went back to Zelda's earliest days in the communist party


This covers a long period from 1945 to 1982 and she does not describe things necessarily chronologically, (most likely not accurately either!) but it gives an overall impression

It was no accident that I joined the Communist Party, nor as it a sudden conversion on the road to Damascus. Being born a Jew had much to do with it My hatred of the home-spun fascists of the 30s and the German nazis goose-stepping across Europe, incarcerating Jew in concentration camps, were the spurs to action. The books that my dad urged me to read gave me a good grounding and Frank Coles put the jigsaw pieces ito place for me. But it was meeting like-mined people at Unity Theatre that gave me the final impetus to join. I was a fuse ready to be lit but it was no done lightly. I was committed. It gave purpose to my life. But what was so important to me was that I was accepted. I was no longer an outsider. belonged.
When I came out of the WAAF and returned home to Finchley, I met Ruth. Her address had been given to me by the communist party as she was the local branch secretary. She welcomed me with a cup of tea and a home-baked cake, the first of many we were to share over the years as our friendship grew. Ruth was slight of figure and just 5 feet tall, but her reputation as a convenor in the GPO factory was formidable. She was the scourge of the management.
Our husbands, Bob and Jerry, were still in the forces at that time but early in 1946 they were both demobbed. They, too, became good friends. In fact, they were so alike that Ruth dubbed them the two headed troll. Out party life spilled over into our social life. We'd all go out together to sell the Daily Worker on the council estates nearby, or sometimes in the pubs, competing with the Salvation Army and their "War Cry". We'd end up in the Five Bells discussing books we'd read, gossiping about people we knew and worrying about world affairs, whilst downing a few gin and tonics and beers. At that time we were concentrating our efforts on Homes for the homeless, pressurising the council to build more flats.

It was Bob who saw to our political education in the branch. He guided us through the works of Lenin, particularly "What is to be done?" and I remember the heated arguments we had around the work of Ludwig Feuerbach.

In later years I sold the Daily Worker outside the gates of Simms Factory at 7.15am dragging my chidren with me, only to be greeted with cries of "Why don't you go and cook your old man's breakfast?" What they didn't know was that my old man was already at work in the factory.

I was active in my union and in the Peace Movement, firstly working in the united nations association an then in CND locally. Most of the committee members of CND in Finchley were either Quakers or from Pax and the others were all Labour party members. We all got on very well - not just tolerating each other, but liking each other. When I stood as a communist candidate in the local election they were all rooting for me even they they wouldn't vote for me. I suffered the humiliation of a derisory vote of 34 the first time I stood, but gradually I built it up to a reasonable figure.
We lived in Margaret Thatcher's constituency and many's the time I bearded her in the surgery of the constituency Conservative Party headquarters. But it wasn't all hard grind in the communist party. There was a flourishing social life. The Sunday night Scottish Dancing club saw Bob and Ruth and Jerry and I reeling with the best of them, and the musical evenings were a showcase for comrades' talents. Tony played the soons, Gladys the mouth organ and Angela the concertina and there was Norman on the accordion and Louis on the violin. Jerry's claim to fame was his spirited rendering of "Albert in the Lion's Den" and "The very fat man who waters the workers' beer!" Singing and socialism remain almost synonymous in my mind. Rambling is another activity I always associate with the Party. We'd tramp across the Chiltern Hills singing "Joe Hill" and end up playing a makeshift game of cricket. What a motley crew we were. The Party embraced such a variety of people from such different backgrounds: working class and aristocrats;comrades from Guyana and Cyprus, South Africa and Mauritius, but we all shared a vision of a socialist future. Each of us came to the Party for very different reasons and we had different levels of commitment, but we did enjoy a comradeship hard to find elsewhere. As branch Secretary I kept open house for the comrades and a constant stream of them tramped to my kitchen, talking, talking, talking, as I scrubbed the floor. Our house was close by a London transport bus garage and when a 10 week bus strike took place we offered our front room to the pickets. They used is as a rest room and for committee meetings. We supplied the tea and sandwiches.
Jerry was very innvolved in Union work and whilst a shop steward in Handley Page's aircraft factory he took part in a number of small strikes. It was the attitudes of the Borough Committee of the Communist Party to one of those strikes that led Jerry to leave the party - a case of Party members on the outside of a factory trying to impose a line on the comrades within the factory. "What do those bloody intellectuals know about factory conditions?" was Jerry's complaint. It aways amazed me how quickly within the Party, when anything went wrong, the ones they blamed were the intellectuals.
Though he left the party, Jerry remaied very friendly with many of the comrades and our house remained a focal point for party activities. So when did things start to go wrong for me? When the 20th Congress of the Soviet communist party took place and its revelations about the Stalin era came to light I was deeply shocked but it did not make me feel i had to leave the Party as so many others did, including Bob. I had not joined the party out of admiration for the Soviet union. It was capitalism in Britain I wanted to fight against. I as convinced that the British Communist Party was different. We could not make such dreadful errors as they had in the Soviet Union. Our circumstances were so different and I believed at that time that we were more democratic. I thought differently later.
Then came the next shock, when the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to put down the 1956 Hungarian uprising. I heard about comades being strung up on lamp-posts. I read that CIA agents and dissidents were streaming into Hungary from Vienna and comrades convinced me that the Soviet tanks were necessary to defend socialism. Although I opened my mind to the truth later I still did tend to believe the CIA was under every bed. That was when Ruth left the Party, but our friendship remained a firm as ever.
The Soviet action in Czechoslovakia really shook me, and I talked it over with my daughter Sue, herself now in the party, and later to become a national executive committee member, as well as talking through it with friends. Although it was 14 years before I finally left the communist party, the long, painful journey out of it began in this period. I began to realise that our own comrades were not infallible; that our British party was undemocratic; that so called democratic centralism created the possibility of dictatorship; that many of its policies were wrong for the times and its so-called leading role in the working class movement -(actually gross interference in the trades unions) - was taking them up blind alleys.
I was one of the people arguing for changes in the Party structures in the 1970s, and against things such as the undemocratic "recommended list" for elections to the executive committee. I argued that new strategies were needed both to attract the youth of the 70s and also to effect the changes in society that we wished to see.
The manipulation of the party's national congress debates always worried me. it was not that they were censored - dissidents were allowed to speak and put over their policies and views both in party literature before congress and on the platform at congress itself - but ranks would close and the big guns would be brought out to shoot them down.
Over the years I suffered doubts about the policies of the socialist countries, but after vainly trying to raise them and get issues debated, I kept my feelings bottled up. When the Soviet Union developed the atomic bomb, we in the British Party were calling for nuclear disarmament. On visits to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries I noted the perks that were due to Party members, and I also noted they paid only lip service to the emancipation of women, and that the attitude of the British party that "all will be well for women once socialism is achieved" was wholly wrong. The doubts loomed larger and larger and the burgeoning womens movement of that time made me question myself and many of my actions. it changed my whole attitude to political parties, lifestyles and work patterns. This was all leading me to leaving the party.
I could no longer stay in, but what a wrench it was to leave. What an inner turmoil I suffered. The party had shaped my whole life for so long and I could not envisage a future without it.
Hugh McDiarmid, the Scottish poet, once wrote that "a man in a red shirt can neither hide nor retreat". I had never tried to hide, I had been proud of my red shirt, and as for retreat, I did not think of it like that. I thought of it more as a step back to take a long hard look at myself and the world But whatever criticisms I may have had, I do know that most of the Party work I undertook was of value, and after i resigned from the party I was gratified still to be asked to write about my new views and work for party journals and to take part in workshops at conferences. One in particular stands out in my memory. I was asked to speak on "The Left and the erotic" at the "Moving Left Show" which took place on a Sunday morning in October 1982. I was one of a pane of speakers including Elizabeth Wilson and Ian McEwan and i was very nervous. My hope was that few would turn up at that early hour. In fact there were about 400 filling the large hall of Queen Mary College and the event was hugely successful. I started by saying I didn't know why I was there talking about sex at 10am in the morning when I could be in bed having it. I pointed out the Puritan ethic within the left and their double standards. The interest shown in that aspect of personal politics decided Lawrence and Wishart to ask me to contribute a chapter to a book on the issue.

[Throughout much of this period Zelda worked at the Daily Worker, Labour Monthly and then again heading up the Fund-raising department at the Daily Worker/Morning Star. Much more detail about that in the next couple of sections.]