This has been a difficult year for many of us, with friends and family passing amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Many more died beyond it – some in the ordinary course of life and others because of the strain it placed on health services across the globe.

For Tribune, a number of these deaths have hit close to home. Leo Panitch, a member of our advisory board, died last month, so too did friends of the magazine like Michael Brooks. In our pandemic issue we paid tribute to socialists who had died in the first months of this crisis, from ‘Franny’ McNeill to Rafael Gómez Nieto, Humberto Inostroza and Pat Midgley.

Sadly, many more have passed in the weeks and months since. Each takes with them their own memories from a lifetime of struggle and their passing dims the collective memory of our movement.

Unfortunately, we can’t pay tribute to them all. But we do try – so if you’re a reader and have an obituary you’d like to see, please contact us.

In the meantime, we publish this article remembering nine more comrades who passed in 2020 having made remarkable contributions to socialism in the course of their lives. They remind us of the importance of keeping alive the connection through generations which is the foundation of our tradition, and the means by which the lessons of the past are learned for the future.

Henry Richardson

Henry Richardson, who died earlier this month, was a sound, passionate, and loyal trade unionist.

I first met Henry during the Miners’ Strike, where, together with Ray Chadburn, he led the Nottinghamshire NUM. The Nottingham coalfield was particularly tough, as the majority of its miners had refused to down tools and continued to work during the strike. But there were others who were fantastically loyal to the NUM – and, of course, to Henry.

The industrial world focused on the events in Nottingham, where Thatcher’s government promised everything to those miners who scabbed: a lifetime of work in a slimmed-down, more productive, and more profitable coal industry. But Henry was always there, reminding the men of the Tories’ real intentions – and as the courts tried to smash the NUM and support the scab ‘union’, the UDM, he experienced the full force of the judicial system.

It was a tough time. But despite the challenges, these were some of the best, most loyal trade unionists I’ve ever met – many of whom I’ve remained in contact with to this day. Henry was a formidable individual, a man with union blood running through his body, a man of great pride and principle who always led from the front. If the trade union movement is to meet the huge challenges ahead of us, we need many more Henry Richardsons.

Ian Lavery MP

Christopher Farman

Christopher Farman, who died on 29 May—on his 83rd birthday—was a journalist, editor, historian, and Labour activist who in recent years devoted much of his time and energy to ensuring greater public awareness of the Oxfordshire men and women who joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. 

He was a leading light in the campaign, which, in 2017, saw the erection of an imposing memorial (sculpted by Charlie Carter) in St Clements, Oxford, to those 31 local volunteers, on which the names of the six who died in Spain are inscribed. And alongside Valerie Rose and Liz Woolley, he co-wrote No Other Way: Oxfordshire and the Spanish Civil War 1936-39 in 2015.

Before moving to Banbury, Chris lived in London. He worked on the Guardian and the Illustrated London News before joining the staff of Time-Life Books in 1973, where he was an editor of ‘The British Empire’ magazine series, and in 1974, he wrote a book about the 1926 General Strike.

From 2013 to 2019, Chris was the chair of the Banbury and Bicester Labour Party. Apart from the usual canvassing, leafleting, and telling at polling stations, he organised ‘Seeing Red’ film nights. He remained energetic and active until his final days, when he was struck down by Covid-19, leaving his wife, Mary, and hundreds of friends and comrades who will miss his natural charm, erudition, and wit.

Jim Jump

Orlando Gutiérrez

Charismatic mining union leader Orlando Gutiérrez died this October in Bolivia, days after he was beaten viciously by a fascist gang protesting the results of the Bolivian elections. His death at just 36 comes amid a surge in violence directed against the trade union and campesino movements in the wake of the November 2019 coup. 

Gutiérrez was born in the mining town of Colquiri, La Paz, and worked his way up the mining union to become executive secretary in 2015. Angus McNelly, a research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, who interviewed Gutiérrez and spent extensive time with mining unions for his research, recalls a man quick to laughter, deeply respected by his fellow miners, and resolutely committed to the struggle for workers’ emancipation. 

The loss of Gutiérrez at the hands of fascist violence is a gut-wrenching blow to the workers movement in Bolivia, to democracy, and to the thousands who knew and loved a courageous union leader. His legacy must now be the just world he did so much to bring about, but sadly never got to see.

Olivia Arigho-Stiles

Maria Fyfe

Phrases like ‘giant of our movement’ are often used when we talk about comrades lost, but Maria Fyfe truly qualifies for that moniker. Elected to Glasgow District Council in 1980, and to Parliament as Scottish Labour’s sole female MP seven years later, she made her mark in the fight for gender equality, in the battle to throw light on the blacklisting practices of the economic league, and in the campaign for fifty-fifty representation in what would be the new Scottish Parliament.

I could scarcely believe that Maria had retired when our paths crossed, for that was far from the impression she gave. The phrase ‘standing down to spend more time in politics’ would fit, were it not for the fact that Maria spent her retirement standing up. Not a march, a rally, campaign, or city party meeting was complete without her contribution. As her voice quietened over the last few years, it lost none of its power — those in attendance at the meetings just listened more carefully. Only Maria could have silenced noisy Labour council group meetings merely by clearing her throat.

Maria wasn’t just a talker — she was a teacher. She had lectured in Trade Union Studies in the years before going to Parliament, teaching a generation of trade unionists who have never forgotten those lessons. Class resumed after parliament, but this time it was at the party meetings around Glasgow where a new generation of activists received firm advice, and endless encouragement.

Today, a monument stands at Govan Cross to a woman who helped build a movement and change the law of the land to benefit generations of working-class people. Maria led the campaign to remember Mary Barbour and the rent strikes, and what stands at Govan Cross is a reminder of what good organisation, solidarity, and socialism can achieve. It stands as much for Maria as for Mary.

Her last book, Singing in the Streets, was published just days before she passed — educating, agitating, and organising to the last. 

Matt Kerr

Edwina Stewart

Born into a Protestant working class family in East Belfast, Edwina’s father was a shipyard worker and active trade unionist who had been injured on the job and set up a newsagents with his compensation money, while her mother was a key tenants movement organiser. Both were active members of the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI), whose youth wing Edwina helped to re-establish in the fifties.

While she was known throughout Ireland for her solidarity work with the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the global peace movement, it was undoubtedly the Irish civil rights movement that gave Edwina national influence. In 1969, she became the secretary of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Campaign (NICRA), a role which saw her leading the fight against religious, housing and job inequality across the six counties. 

She handled this role with bravery, and her involvement came at serious cost. After it was reported that she was on the speakers’ platform during Bloody Sunday in Derry, scores of death threats poured into the school she worked at. Her fellow teachers refused to speak to her because of her association with NICRA, and the school responded to the death threats by sacking her. 

However, many Catholic schools also refused to employ her due to her socialist, atheist convictions, leading her to reflect later on in life that she had been victimised because “I was a Communist and a Protestant”.

Alongside her husband Jimmy, who later became the General Secretary of the CPI, Edwina never gave up on the fight for social justice. She was one of the many eyewitnesses who gave evidence to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, the results of which led to David Cameron’s formal apology for the death of 14 innocent protesters by British paratroopers, and remained active in working-class politics in Belfast until the very end. She will be missed by her comrades across Ireland, who will treasure her memory and legacy.

Marcus Barnett and Ronan Burtenshaw

José María ‘Chato’ Galante

On 29 March, José María ‘Chato’ Galante, the voice of a generation of political prisoners tortured under the Francoist dictatorship, died aged 71 in Madrid. A tireless campaigner and well-known figure on the Spanish left, Galante founded La Comuna, a political space for the recuperation of historical memory, in 2008. He later gained wider international prominence through the 2018 documentary The Silence of Others, which followed Galante and other victims of Franco’s brutal regime in their struggle for historical justice.

Galante had become active in the anti-Francoist student movement after his friend, Enrique Ruano, was murdered by the Spanish police’s ‘political brigade’ in 1969. In 1971, he was arrested by Francoist security forces and subjected to fourteen days of torture, before spending most of the next five years as a political prisoner. ‘For them I wasn’t a person or even an animal,’ Galante would later recount. ‘I thought to myself that I had to endure it. I didn’t resist for my political convictions, but out of a sense of rage – because I was a human being.’

Like many other victims, he didn’t speak of his experiences until decades later. ‘During a long time we didn’t exist,’ Galante told Juan Carlos Monedero in a 2019 interview. ‘From the start [of the transition to democracy] there was a pact of silence and forgetting that, rather than proposing an alternative narrative [to what had happened under the dictatorship], simply denied the existence of such crimes.’

In 2010, he was one of the coordinators that organised the historic legal proceedings in Argentina against the remaining high officials of the Francoist regime – a case which was initiated under the principle of universal jurisdiction for serious human rights crimes. Among those charged was the notorious torturer Antonio González Pacheco (known as ‘Billy the Kid’), who had led Galante’s interrogation. His extradition, however, was subsequently blocked by Spain’s High Court—as was those of the other officials—due to the protections afforded by 1977 amnesty law. 

The two men—one representing the best of Spain’s long anti-fascist struggle, the other a sadistic torturer who symbolised the continued impunity of the Franco-era officials—died weeks apart, both from Covid-19. Yet part of Galante’s lasting legacy, along with that of the wider historical memory movement, has been to shift the public perception of Spain’s recent past – ensuring a much broader recognition now exists of the human rights abuses committed by the likes of Pacheco.

Eoghan Gilmartin

André Schmer

André Schmer, who died of Covid-19 in April, was one of the last surviving members of the Francs-tireurs et partisans – main-d’œuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI), the Communist-led resistance organisation during the Second World War mostly composed of immigrants to France. 

Born into a working-class Jewish family in the Polish town of Przemysl in May 1927, André – born Schmer Nehemiasz – fled to Paris. When war came and the French government fell to the Nazis in 1940, a 14-year-old André responded to the anti-Jewish legislation of Marshall Pétain’s collaborationist government by joining the youth wing of the Communist Party of France (PCF).

As a militant in the Jeunes Communistes, André’s activities led to his denunciation to the authorities by a classmate. After a brief time hiding in a village near Normandy – where he escaped the French police’s mass deportation of Parisian Jewry to Auschwitz in July 1942 – he returned to Paris, before again fleeing to Lyon, where he was given the nom-de-guerre Étienne Dumon.

In Lyon, “Étienne” was put to work organising armed self-defence, derailing trains, and executing occupying Nazis and their local collaborators. He fought throughout the liberation struggle, and was demobilised in November 1944 with the rank of corporal.

After the war, André worked as a milliner and joined the legalised PCF. He met his wife, Christiane, at an event held by the CGT union in 1948. Their daughter, Francoise, was born in 1950, the same year that he gained French citizenship.

André never picked up a gun again, telling a journalist in 2014 that “a gun changes a man.” He remained active in the PCF and CGT, and became a strong advocate of the Palestinian cause. He spoke at schools – particularly those with large immigrant populations – about the contribution of immigrants to the anti-Nazi struggle.

Until the very end, André Schmer remained faithful to the radical universalism of his youth and lived without regrets. In an interview several years before he died, he summarised what the anti-fascist struggle meant for many of his generation: “either I got caught like a sheep, or I resisted.”

Marcus Barnett

Jerry Rawlings

Early on November 12, retired major Henry Smith called me from London to tell me that his former comrade and friend, Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings had died. Rawlings lived many lives, transforming from idealistic young Air Force pilot to imprisoned coup-plotter to chairman of two revolutionary military governments to champion of neoliberal reform and president of Ghana’s 4th Republic, before peacefully handing over power in 2001.

Rawlings was the transcendent African political figure of his generation. His complex story reveals the grand political transformations of the late twentieth century and the ongoing significance of 1970s global geopolitics. Even as he led his nation across several political eras, Rawlings maintained a lifelong passion for alleviating the suffering of the nation’s and the continent’s most needy citizens. He was one of the last radical 1970s heads of state, and one of the few who lived to old age. Most revolutionaries of that era died in exile or, like Maurice Bishop in Grenada and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, were killed as they challenged the West and experimented with new forms of governance.

As the revolutionary past grew increasingly distant for young Ghanaians, Rawlings lamented that the sacrifices of the June 4 uprising and December 31 revolution had been wasted, with levels of graft and inequality reaching new heights. He had embodied the hopes and uncertainties of the 1970s generation, guiding Ghana across a complex, changing terrain in search of radical freedom and liberation.

Rawlings was a man of passion who never stopped fighting for his people, especially the most vulnerable. Rest well.

Jesse Weaver Shipley

Ron Atkins

Ron Atkins, who died on December 30 aged 104, led an amazing life. Born in Wales during the First World War, it was Ron’s witnessing of the dehumanising treatment faced by coal miners during the Great Depression which moved him to join the Labour party as a teenager in the early thirties. Over the following nine decades, Ron never compromised on the socialist values forged from those early experiences, remaining firmly on the Left.

After taking active roles in trade union organising, teaching and lecturing, as well as serving as a district councillor in Essex, Ron was selected to fight Preston North, serving as its MP from 1966 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1979.

Ron was an excellent socialist MP, staying true to his values by championing the causes of CND and of the movement against the war in Vietnam. During the 1976 Labour Leadership contest, Ron was the campaign manager for Tony Benn, believing him to be the best candidate to implement the democratic wishes of the party grassroots.

On the ground in Preston, Ron campaigned successfully to create Preston Polytechnic, later becoming the thriving University of Central Lancashire (UCLan). He fought so that rail services were expanded for Preston, and was a staunch defender of the city’s manufacturing industry. When he lost to Conservative Robert Atkins in 1979 by just 29 votes, it was seen to be such a controversial result that it is still debated to this day.

After leaving Parliament, Ron became a Councillor on Preston City Council, chairing the council’s planning committee and being involved in many other key committees until retiring in 2010 at the age of 93.

When Jeremy Corbyn announced his intention to stand for Labour leader in 2015, I invited Ron to introduce him at a very good natured event at The Continental pub. He made a fantastic speech calling for the need for Labour to embrace a radical direction opposing austerity and tackling the inequality he campaigned against all his political life.

When he died, aged 104 and surrounded by his loving family, Ron was the oldest former parliamentarian, but his radical, independent spirit remained with him until the end. He leaves a widow, Councillor Liz Atkins, and a wider family, many of whom remain active in Labour politics in Preston.

Matthew Brown