Michael Lipman (1902-1978): a short biography

Michael Isaac Lipman was born in Leeds in 1902. The only boy of five children, Lipman’s parents were Russian Jewish emigrés who had settled in England in the Spring of 1892. From his earliest memories, Lipman found himself engulfed in the anarchist-socialist politics of his atheist parents whose house was always full of visiting revolutionaries and conscientious objectors from across England and the rest of the world. The most famous of these was Emma Goldman. After the war, Lipman attended Bradford Technical College before going on to Leeds University where he trained as an engineer. In 1924, Lipman started an electrical contracting business with a friend, which for a year or so was a huge success as they took advantage of the radio boom to assemble and supply wireless radio sets and parts for businesses and homes across Yorkshire. In 1928, Lipman sold his share of the partnership and moved to London where he began a successful industrial career developing the radio industry across Europe, mainly with the company Ekco.

Just prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, Ekco and specifically Lipman were commandeered by the RAF to find factory premises capable of producing radio aircraft-detection systems that would be installed in RAF planes to detect bombers, surface ships and submarines at night and in bad visibility. The activities of Lipman and the radar innovators at Cowbridge House became the subject of the book War Factory by Celia Fremlin of the social anthropology group Mass-Observation. The factory made one of the most important contributions to the defeat of Hitler and led to Lipman being awarded the MBE in 1944. After the war, Lipman joined forces with an Austrian businessman as part of an export business, developing trade links with countries across the Eastern bloc, particularly Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. It was a career that entailed spending long and frequent periods abroad and so, as the sixties began, Lipman and his wife, Gertrude Emily Lipman, decided to slow down, moving out of London to a hundred-acre farm in Kent. Despite no agricultural farming knowledge or background, he immediately applied his brilliant technical mind to farming and increased the productivity of the land year on year. In his final years Lipman turned to reflect on his life, producing the remarkable Memoirs of a Socialist Businessman.

Lipman passionately believed in the ability of people to democratically control and organise society in a just, egalitarian and efficient way. To him, electoral democracy was was only a minimum prerequisite of democracy where the class system determined real power. He was above all a pragmatist, someone who believed in gradual human improvement through enlightened government and employer attitudes, the application of modern science and industrial techniques. He had little time for the divided dogmas and theological fundamentalisms of the socialist and Marxist left, seeing Marx’s true legacy as his philosophical and analytical approach to interpreting the world, and not the answer to changing it. He was especially critical of those Marxists who fetishised the working class. Lipman’s commitment to socialist education and research was probably born through his experience of the Socialist Sunday School movement in the early 1900s. His dismay at the breakdown in this tradition was clearly an inspiration behind his creation of the Lipman Educational Trust in 1974 with a foundation sum of £50,000. He wanted to encourage socialist and progressive educational research, wiritng and debate.

Michael Lipman died in 1978.
Click here for a more detailed history of Lipman’s life and politics

Ralph Miliband (1924-1994): a short biography

Adolphe (Ralph) Miliband was born in Brussels on 7th January, 1924 to Polish Jewish parents who had fled economic depression in Warsaw. Hitler’s invasion of Belgium in May 1940 as part of the Nazis’ Western Offensive split the Miliband family in half: Ralph and father Samuel fled to England, while Ralph’s mother Renée and baby sister Nan stayed behind and hid on a farm for the duration of the war. They would not be reunited until 1950. Settling in London as a refugee, the young Miliband changed his name from Adolphe to Ralph and found work as a furniture-remover emptying bombed houses. The huge class inequalities and appalling conditions of immigrants and refugees of the East End slums was to prove an incredibly politicising environment for Miliband. In the summer of 1940, he visited Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetary where he swore an oath to the workers’ cause. Inspired in particular by the writings of Harold Laski, Miliband successfully applied to Laski’s university, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1941. Politically active on campus, Miliband was elected Vice President of the LSE Students' Union in 1943 but soon afterwards temporarily halted his university career to join the Royal Navy. In 1947, Miliband obtained a First Class degree and was awarded a Leverhulme research studentship to work full-time under Laski’s supervision on his Ph.D. thesis, Popular Thought in the French Revolution, which examined the political ideas of the illiterate 'menu peuple' (the ‘common people’). In 1949, Miliband became Assistant Lecturer in Political Science at LSE.

Miliband was to remain at the LSE until 1972 when he was appointed Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds. By this time, Ralph Miliband had become one of the leading Marxist thinkers and principal figures associated with the British New Left that had emerged after the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the expulsion of dissident members of the Communist Party like Edward Thompson and John Saville for their criticism of Stalinism. Miliband’s first book, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour (1961), argued through detailed historical study of the politics of Labourism since 1900 how the party’s dogmatic attachment to the dominant parliamentary representative system compromised its commitment to socialism and class struggle. In 1964, Miliband launched the annual, Socialist Register, which he would co-edit with first Saville and then Leo Panitch until his death. Miliband’s growing scepticism about the parliamentary road to socialism grew throughout the 1960s and was combined with equal rejection of Communist and Trotskyist alternatives. The experience renewed his belief in accessible socialist education as one of the most important elements of building the mass socialist alternatives to capitalism. Perhaps Miliband’s most famous and important intellectual contribution came with the 1969 publication of The State in Capitalist Society, a sociological analysis of how the state in the advanced capitalist world was dominated by class interests, fundamentally undermining pluralist notions of the state as a neutral arbiter between competing interest groups.

In 1974, Ralph Miliband took up his role as director of the Lipman Trust. After leaving Leeds in 1978, Miliband became a roving academic teacher for the rest of his life, spending much time in North America. During the 1980s, he became increasingly involved in efforts to build and empower the independent left in Britain along with Tony Benn, Hilary Wainwright, Raymond Williams and others, encapsulated in the Chesterfield Socialist Conferences out of which emerged the Socialist Movement and the independent green-left magazine Red Pepper (1994). All of this was symptomatic of Miliband’s lifetime commitment to developing socialist education and thought within communities and outside of the narrow confines of academia.

Click here for a more detailed history of Miliband’s life and politics.

John Saville(1916- ): A Short Biography

Born Orestes Stamatopoulos in 1916, in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, and educated at the Royal Liberty School, Romford, Essex, John Saville was school captain of soccer, swimming, athletics and eventually, in the upper sixth, the school itself. Awarded a county scholarship and a bursary by the London School of Economics, he studied there for three years and graduated with first class honours in 1937.

While at university, Saville joined the Communist Party and was among the anti-fascist student contingent at the battle of Cable Street. But for the war, a career in business loomed. Contrary to general advice given by the Communist Party, Saville was steadfast in refusing an army commission and ended the war with the rank of Warrant Officer 1, as a sergeant major instructor of gunnery. These were times of considerable agitation in the armed forces, for the election of 1945, and in opposition to the officers steeped in the reactionary attitudes of the Indian empire, which led on occasion to arrests and prosecutions of British soldiers.

On his return, Saville joined the chief scientific division of the Ministry of Works, which was then tackling the scale of the devastation and depreciation of stock wreaked by war. There was also the Communist Party history group, rapidly attracting some of the finest historical minds of the twentieth century; regular discussions were held with Christopher Hill, Dona Torr, Victor Kiernan, Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson, amongst many others. The post-war party was at loggerheads with the government of Clement Attlee on numerous questions of the day, and on some issues of individual rights, including the jailing of Arthur Attwood in July 1946.

Appointed lecturer in economic history at the University College, Hull, in 1947, Saville became engaged in much political activity, including Daily Worker bazaars, meetings on industrial, port and housing issues, and the organisation of classes on public speaking for trade unionists. In 1956, he started, with Edward Thompson and a group of like minded Communists, the Reasoner, which questioned aspects of party policy. On resignation from the party, the New Reasoner was launched as a journal of socialist humanism with Saville and Thompson as editors. The new journal ran for three years from 1956 until amalgamation to form the New Left Review.

In the 1960s, as economic and social history attracted increasing attention, new resources came to Hull for more staff and facilities, including a new social science block and an important University library with an archival collection. Under Saville's guidance the subject area grew fast, and with a separate department, so did postgraduate and research work. Saville's own work included masterminding the huge research project for the Dictionary of Labour Biography, which reached ten volumes by the time the project was turned over to new editors. The Dictionary addresses the vast tapestry which has been British labour history, and the endless record of hostility and discrimination faced by trade unionists for over two centuries.

Together with Ralph Miliband, and ably supported by Merlin Press, the annual Socialist Register was launched in 1964, and set a new tone in for socialist scholarship: the journal is now in the 42nd year of publication. The foundation of the Lipman Trust in 1974 owes much to his imaginative skills as to its potential in supporting socialist education. Saville has continued to offer discussions on aspects of socialist history and contemporary affairs and to pen the occasional piece for the journal Socialist History.

Click here for a more detailed history of Saville's life and politics.

Gertrude Emily Lipman (1905-1990): a short biography

My aunt, Gertrude Emily Lipman, was born in 1905, the second eldest of nine children of Harry and Ethel Sykes (née Howard). Her father worked as a faceworker in the South Yorkshire coalfields at Elsecar Colliery near Hoyland. Harry and Ethel started their married life together in a small house, in a row of three such houses, in the tiny rural hamlet of Blacker Hill, near Barnsley in South Yorkshire. It was a politically aware household, as was often the case in mining communities, and would lead in time to all their children, especially the boys, espousing the cause of left wing socialism. Harry Sykes on one occasion met James Keir Hardie, a founder and the first leader of the Independent Labour Party.

Gertrude Emily, who would come to be known as ‘Mick’ to her family and wider circle of friends and acquaintances, reached her early teens during the First World War. That terrible conflict made its mark on her young and impressionable mind and left her a convinced atheist, unable to accept the idea of a God who would allow her favourite uncle, Louis Howard, to be killed in the trenches of northern France. Her formal education, like so many of her generation and gender, was limited in formal academic terms to the local village school, but she became an avid reader of all manner of books, both fiction and non-fiction, which more than made up for this earlier limitation and would sustain her thirst for knowledge thought the rest of her life.

Mick was later apprenticed to a milliner in Leeds where she not only learned a craft to earn a living but also added a practical skill to her burgeoning sense of style and elegance which made her stand out amongst her peers. She could transform a slim wardrobe with a strategically placed scarf, or hats worn always at an interesting angle to enhance her finely chiselled features, and create a captivating image, which would lead her future husband to refer to her as a “strikingly original Yorkshire girl”. I have always thought of her as reminiscent of Greta Garbo although without that actress’s exaggerated recluseness.

But it was not only her beauty and style that would lead to this epithet. Her sharply enquiring mind and appetite for reading combined with her increasingly strongly held social and political views forged in the cauldron of a new awareness following the First World War. They also combined powerfully with those of her future husband and resulted in a perfect match in which she became such an indispensable support for him and his growing business career both at home and abroad. The pair eventually met through the auspices of Mrs King, the head of the Biology Department at Leeds University and Warden of the ladies’ hall of residence at Weetwood, where Mick had spent a summer sewing and repairing bed linen with her sister Edna.

Blessed with a spirit of adventure, she moved to London in 1927 to try her luck in the wider world, which became the catalyst for Mike Lipman to wind up his business partnership in the north and follow her to London, where they got married the following year. She also had an strongly matriarchal sense of family loyalty, which would lead, in the early 1930’s, to an early migration southwards of her brothers and sisters, and eventually parents, to where the Lipman home in Essex, and a variety of jobs for her brothers, including in the Ekco radio factory in Southend-on-Sea, where Mike had started work as Production Engineer in 1930. To all around them, Mick and Mike – eventually known more simply as the ‘Micks’ –were obviously the best of friends and developed that quality so typical of successful marriages of enhancing each other’s strengths, and keeping a sense of the one always with the other. Her matriarchal and organisational abilities were given fresh expression when, with the expansion of the workforce at the Ekco Radar factory in Malmesbury during the Second World War, she turned her own home, Rodbourne House, into a girls hostel to provide some of the necessary additional accommodation, later voted as the best of its type in the country by an all-party group of female Members of Parliament.

My earliest personal recollections of my aunt were from the early 1950’s when the Micks were living in a large, elegantly furnished apartment in Maida Vale. I would have only been five or six years of age at the time and remember being horrified to learn that I was to sleep overnight on the chaise longue, which I misheard as the “shed long” and imagined it meant I had to sleep in the garden! This difficulty was quickly cleared up when I was shown this long chair. I was to enjoy many such visits to my favourite aunt, firstly as a child to the flat in London, and then later to Ponds Farm in Frittenden in Kent, where Mick invested all her accumulated energy and style in the renovation of a 16th century farmhouse, which became a focal point for the whole family and where Mick loved to entertain.

Shortly before Mike died in 1978, he asked me, as an accountant as well as nephew, to help my aunt deal with all the financial matters that she would be experiencing for the first time, especially those immediately arising from the disposition of his estate. This I gladly undertook, although I soon realised that these new tasks were no more daunting to her than any other challenge in her life. What was obvious, however, was how very much she missed Mike and their rich life together, and without which, understandably, she found it so difficult to come to terms. However, she continued to read and debate the important issues of the day as often as she could, and it was during this last period of her life that I came to spend much more time with her than before, happily fulfilling my understanding of the promise to Mike, and getting to know her better as a person, as distinct from just my aunt.

Three years before she died in 1990, whilst in hospital being treated for pneumonia, she suffered the first of a series of strokes that were to leave her progressively physically incapacitated, and, most poignantly, affecting her eyesight so severely that she was latterly unable to read. I know this loss of sight was the cruellest blow of all and so feel sure that, when she passed away quietly in her sleep in the autumn of 1990, she was ready to leave the stage of life and take her place in the memories of those who come after to fulfil the dreams and aspirations that are their historical and familial legacy.

Stephen Sykes

Click here to read a biography of Gertrude Emily Lipman