06.12.2001

Obituary: Ray Gibbon 1929-2001

For the underdog

Ray Gibbon, communist and class fighter, died on October 9 after a battle with cancer.

Born in west London, Ray spent the war years in Birmingham, where he attended grammar school - not a mean feat for a working class kid at that time. After the war, he went to sea. Visiting a devastated Hamburg, he realised that Germans were not the demons of official propaganda, but people much like himself. Jumping ship in Canada, he made his way to New York. There he worked in the kitchens of a kosher hotel, earning the nickname of 'Rayele' - little Ray.

Seeing the wide gap between rich and poor and the ever-present racism in American society, Ray joined the US Communist Party. As the wartime alliance gave way to the cold war, he was rounded up for deportation as an 'undesirable alien'. He was interned on Ellis Island with CLR James. At the time they were in different political camps: Ray was an orthodox communist and James a Trotskyist with growing differences with mainstream Trotskyism.

Back in England Ray was called up for national service. He was stationed in North Africa and Cyprus, where he made contact with Akel, the Cypriot Communist Party. This was a dangerous thing to do. Released from the army, Ray went to work in engineering in west London and became a shop steward convenor in the AEU. Notting Hill was then being torn by race riots. When a black man was murdered, Ray went as a white worker to express solidarity with the black community.

Later Ray worked for Progressive Tours. There he came into contact with Maureen Scott and Mike Baker, who had joined the Committee to Defeat Revisionism for Communist Unity, a pro-China group. Maureen kept him supplied with copies of its paper Vanguard. Ray visited the USSR with Bill Turner of the Independent Labour Party. What he saw there and his discussions with Bill sowed the seeds of doubt in his mind about Stalinism and he drifted out of the CP.

In the 1970s Ray was involved in the squatting movement. When Centre Point was occupied as a protest against homelessness, Ray was one of the first two in. In another occupation in Brixton he acted as an ostensibly respectable front man for the operation.

I met Ray at meetings of the Movement for Workers' Councils - a tiny group of left communists set up by Joe Thomas, who had broken from Stalinism under the influence of Oehler and Mike Baker. Ray also took part in an informal discussion circle, which included anarchists, dissident Labour Party members and the odd Socialist Workers Party member, which met in my flat.

When the Socialist Labour Party was formed in 1996, Ray joined, seeing it as a potential breakthrough for the left. However, he soon left, sickened at the dictatorship of Arthur Scargill.

Ray's last political contribution was a letter to the Weekly Worker in which he tried to make some sense of the vote scored by the BNP in Oldham.

Ray was always on the side of the underdog. Strong in debate, he was without malice and rancour. Widely read and deeply cultured, he loved music - from opera to Paul Robeson. He greatly enjoyed his garden and his cats.

It may sound like a cliché, but they really don't make them like that any more.

Terry Liddle