He raised the workers' flag and the republic's on a single staff
Too wounded to stand, he was shot tied to a chair — Kilmainham Gaol, 12 May 1916
A socialist revolutionary who fused Marxism with Irish national liberation. He founded the Irish Citizen Army, commanded the Dublin Brigade in the 1916 Easter Rising, and was executed by the British after its suppression.
Career timeline
- 1896Founds the Irish Socialist Republican Party
- 1903–1910IWW organizer in America
- 1910–1914Leads the ITGWU through the 1913 Dublin Lockout
- 1910Published Labour in Irish History
- 1913Founds the Irish Citizen Army
- 1915Published The Re-Conquest of Ireland
- 1916.04Easter Rising — Dublin commandant, signatory of the Proclamation
- 1916.05Shot at Kilmainham Gaol
A pragmatic statesman who carried trade-union power into postwar diplomacy
At the 1946 Moscow conference, after Molotov’s repeated attacks, Bevin rose and shouted, “I've had enough of this I 'ave!”
Ernest Bevin was a Labour politician and trade-union organizer who rose from poverty to lead Britain’s largest union. His wartime management of labour shaped a postwar diplomacy that treated reconstruction as a question of organized work and state capacity. As Foreign Secretary, he and Georges Bidault organized the European response to Marshall’s Harvard speech, linking British security and western European cooperation to American aid and an Atlantic alliance. His firm anti-communism and defence of imperial interests also show how the postwar international order combined reconstruction with continuing forms of power.
Career timeline
- 1910Secretary, Bristol branch of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union
- 1914National organiser, Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union
- 1922–1940General Secretary, Transport and General Workers’ Union
- 1940–1945Minister of Labour and National Service, wartime coalition government
- 1945–1951Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Attlee government
- 1947Organized the CEEC with Georges Bidault and led Britain’s response to Marshall aid
- 1949Contributed to the creation of NATO
Left communist who broke from her mother's WSPU to stand with East End working women, buried among Ethiopian patriots
"The Bolsheviks have begun to desert communism." In her 1922 Open Letter to Lenin, Pankhurst broke with Moscow. Expelled from the CPGB for refusing to surrender the Workers' Dreadnought, she chose free debate over party discipline.
British suffragette, left communist and anti-colonial activist. Breaking from her mother Emmeline's WSPU to organise working-class women in the East End, she debated Lenin and turned council communist before devoting her final decades to Ethiopia's anti-fascist struggle.
Career timeline
- 1882Born in Manchester to Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst
- 1903–1914Full-time WSPU organiser — designed logo and banners, witnessed Black Friday 1910, organised nationwide suffrage campaign
- 1914–1918Founded ELFS, launched Woman's Dreadnought — anti-war and anti-conscription agitation, rent strikes and cost-price canteens
- 1918–1920Founded WSF, published Workers' Dreadnought — attended 2nd Comintern Congress, debated Lenin directly
- 1921–1924Expelled from CPGB; published Open Letter to Lenin — turned council communist, formed Communist Workers' Party
- 1935–1956Founded and edited New Times and Ethiopia News — opposed fascist invasion, shaped pan-African and anti-colonial opinion
- 1956–1960Moved to Ethiopia — adviser to Haile Selassie, fundraised for first teaching hospital, wrote Ethiopia: A Cultural History
- 1960Died aged 78 in Addis Ababa — Ethiopian state funeral, buried among patriots at Holy Trinity Cathedral
The Trotskyist theorist who defined the USSR as bureaucratic state capitalism and built Britain's Socialist Workers Party
The slogan the Cliff group raised in 1950, when a handful of supporters brought out Socialist Review: “Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism.” It was a refusal of both camps of the Cold War, and the sentence that defined this current for the next half century.
Born Yigael Glückstein. Raised in Palestine in a family of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he left the Zionist left in his teens for Trotskyism, served twelve months in a British Mandate prison for anti-war agitation, and moved to Britain in 1947. In The Nature of Stalinist Russia (1948) he defined the USSR not as a degenerated workers'' state but as bureaucratic state capitalism, breaking with Fourth International orthodoxy, and on that base he built the theory of the permanent arms economy, which explained the postwar boom by East-West military spending, and of deflected permanent revolution, in which neither bourgeoisie nor working class but intellectuals and officers carry the revolution out. The organization he started as the Socialist Review Group in 1950 became the International Socialists and, in 1977, the Socialist Workers Party. He left a study of Rosa Luxemburg and four-volume biographies of Lenin and of Trotsky, and, never granted British citizenship, remained stateless all his life.
Career timeline
- 1917Born Yigael Glückstein at Zikhron Ya'akov in Ottoman Palestine, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents
- 1931–1933Began in the youth section of Mapai, then Poale Zion, inside the Zionist left
- late 1930sBecame a Trotskyist and an anti-Zionist; active in the small Palestinian Trotskyist movement
- 1939Arrested by the British Mandate authorities and held twelve months in Acre prison
- 1945Married the South African socialist Chanie Rosenberg
- 1947Moved to Britain, was refused leave to remain, and worked in Dublin instead
- 1948Published The Nature of Stalinist Russia, defining the USSR as bureaucratic state capitalism
- 1950Founded the Socialist Review Group: neither Washington nor Moscow
- 1952Allowed back into Britain and settled in London
- 1959Published Rosa Luxemburg: A Study, first using the pen name Tony Cliff
- 1962–1963Renamed the group the International Socialists and formulated deflected permanent revolution
- 1977Founded the Socialist Workers Party
- 1975–1993Wrote his four-volume Lenin and four-volume Trotsky
- 2000.04.09Died in London after heart surgery, still a stateless person
A communist journalist who chose the scene over the party line
At a workers’ council election, hearing “we have absolutely no experience of electing people,” he thought: “So much for ‘people’s democracy.”
Peter Fryer was an English Marxist writer and journalist who sought both truth within the communist movement and international solidarity. In Hungary in 1956 he reported a workers’ and students’ uprising, but the Daily Worker censored or suppressed his dispatches, and he answered with Hungarian Tragedy. The conflict led to his expulsion from the Communist Party and contributed to the crisis that split British communism, after which he became a major historian of Black Britain.
Career timeline
- 1942Joined the Young Communist League
- 1943–1947Reporter, Yorkshire Post
- 1945Joined the Communist Party of Great Britain
- 1948–1956Parliamentary and foreign correspondent, Daily Worker
- 1956Covered the Hungarian Revolution and wrote Hungarian Tragedy
- 1957–1959Editor of The Newsletter and founding member of the Socialist Labour League
- 1984Published Staying Power
- 2006Died in London
