I first heard about Frank Graham when a friend and comrade of mine was researching an aspect of Labour movement history for her final year dissertation at the University of Birmingham around 1980, her description of their encounter was memorable, since it was clear that Frank still held very fast to the beliefs and principles which had informed his view of the world all his life. I suppose he was the original 'Unrepentant Communist'. I did not know then that I too would encounter this memorable individual face to face on numerous occasions both in a political context and through research undertaken with my co-author Dr Donald Watson on the Spanish Civil War and the North East of England, which culminated in the publication of
'An Inspiring Example- The North East of England and the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939' (Watson and Corcoran 1996). That publication is still available for purchase via Abe Books , see link,
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Watson+and+Corcoran&sts=t&tn=An+Inspiring+Example&x=44&y=11 When we heard of his death both Don and I felt that we had lost both a good friend and an irreplaceable link with the past. The photograph reproduced here is quite a rare find, and I like to think that Frank would be particularly proud of this image as he leads the North East's returning volunteers into the mass rally in honour of the returned International Brigaders in Newcastle City Hall in 1939. There has also recently appeared an article in the Sunday Times about the by now dwindling band of living Spanish Civil War International Brigade veterans...see
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2688486.eceAlso Reproduced below in full , is Don's excellent appreciation of Frank's rich, varied, and highly successful life.
Salud ! Gabriel
An Appreciation of Frank Graham ......Frank Graham, who died in a Newcastle nursing home aged 93 on April 30th 2006, was an International Brigade soldier who later became one of the most successful local publishers in Britain since the Second World War.
Francis Moore Graham was born in Sunderland in 1913, one of five children. His father worked in a draper’s shop. Academically gifted, he won scholarships to the Bede Grammar School in Sunderland and then to King’s College at the University of London. His course – Classics – did not prove to his taste and neither did the College. He spent more time in lectures at the LSE and became active in the student politics of the early 1930s. He threw himself into anti-fascist work, including the famous fight during Oswald Mosley’s rally at the Olympiad in London, and through this he joined the Communist Party.
Money pressures forced Frank to abandon his course and he returned to Sunderland, by then a town devastated by unemployment. He was active in the National Unemployed Workers Movement in the town and helped to organise local contingents for the 1934 and 1936 NUWM Hunger Marches to London. A police report to the Special Branch on the 1936 March described him as ‘one worth watching’. He was always scathing about the more famous but ‘non-political’ Jarrow March in the same year.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War Frank was instrumental in organising volunteers from Sunderland to join the British Battalion of the International Brigade. Around twenty Sunderland men served but Frank and three of his comrades from the local NUWM we
re the first of them to arrive in Spain at Christmas 1936. Frank fought through the ferocious battle of Jarama in January and February 1937, and in the trench warfare that followed, when British and Irish volunteers played a crucial role in preventing the fascists under General Franco from seizing the main route to Madrid and an early victory. But the casualties were enormous and Frank was deeply affected by the deaths in action of two of his close friends from Sunderland. He helped to bring one of their bodies back, in darkness, from outside the fascist lines. In April Frank toured England to speak at meetings of the various campaigns to support the Spanish Republic. He returned to the Brigade and took part in the battle of Brunete and the fighting around Villanueva de la Canada. By this time he was attached to the Brigade staff and acted as a reconnaissance officer, often on horseback, for British commanders Fred Copeman and Jock Cunningham.
He was seriously wounded at the battle of Caspe in March 1938. After leaving hospital Frank contributed to Republican radio broadcasts in Barcelona until he contracted typhoid; Sam Russell, a fellow Brigader and a journalist, negotiated his repatriation through a hostile British Embassy towards the end of 1938. On return to Britain he was a speaker at the commemorative rally for the North East of England International Brigade volunteers at Newcastle City Hall, which was attended by over 2,000 people.
The wounds Frank had received in Spain rendered him unfit for further military service and he spent the Second World War in manual jobs, including a spell as a Co-op milkman, on Teeside, where he also worked for the Communist Party. In 1945 he trained as a teacher and then taught for 15 years at Wharrier Street School in Newcastle.
Frank realised how little had been published on the history of the north east of England since the Victorian and Edwardian periods when he was teaching evening classes for the WEA. To fill this gap for his class he researched and published a pamphlet on the history of Lindisfarne on the Northumberland coast. Holy Island appeared in 1958 and sold nearly 3,000 copies in 18 months. Frank realised that there was a market in the region for scholarly but popular and accessible accounts of local history and culture. Thus began Frank Graham the publishing firm, and this, capitalised by a shrewdly-run sideline in antiques and old prints, became his full time business between the 1960s and his retirement.
The first books were on the castles, battles and town histories of the area along with a number on the social and military history of Hadrian’s Wall. But the range was always noted for width, and it included railway studies and 17 books on coalmining and the history of the mining trades unions. They included the Banner Book and Ray Challinor’s The Lancashire and Cheshire Miners. Another useful addition to local studies were the various Miscellanies he produced on social and political themes.
His publication of Larn Yersel Geordie by Scott Dobson was controversial. Some felt it just made a joke out of local dialect and culture. But it was also an extraordinary success: the first run of 3,000 copies sold out in 48 hours and a total of 81,000 copies were sold in the first year. Such successes made a number of solid achievements financially possible. These included re- publishing Victorian collections of northeast songs (some with new introductions by Dave Harker), thus preserving invaluable records of local traditions as well as unique social history resources. The unique contemporary illustrations in Thomas Hair’s Sketches of the Coal Mines in Northumberland and Durham (1844), and his facsimiles of engravings by Thomas Bewick are other examples. Frank kept works by local writers Sid Chaplin and Jack Common in print, and published the first studies of Thomas Spence. Publications included two accounts of his own experiences in Spain and a re-print, in 1975, of the official Book of the XVth International Brigade, originally published in 1938 while the war was in progress.
The books and pamphlets were generally illustrated, and to a very high standard, by local photographers and particularly artists such as Ronald and Gill Embleton. The publications received no grants or subsidies and did not take advertising. Wherever possible the printing and binding were also done in the north east - Frank saw no point in producing books promoting the history and culture of the region and then having them printed and bound in the south of England. Further, his pricing policy deliberately put most of them within the budgets of schools, libraries and tourist information offices as well as the general public.
When the firm was sold in 1987 it had published 387 titles (of which 103 were written by Frank himself) with total sales of over three million copies – a British record for local publishing.
Frank was a stalwart member of the International Brigade Memorial Trust and attended their annual commemorative meetings until infirmity prevented him. His views on the internal politics of the Spanish Republic, and on the Soviet Union, remained very much the same as those he had held in the Communist Party as a young man. Like all the surviving International Brigaders Frank felt great satisfaction about the growing interest in the Spanish Civil War in recent years. He was also fortunate enough to attend memorial meetings in Spain after the restoration of democracy and experience the respect and affection in which the anti-fascist volunteers are held there. He left Vera, his wife (and former business partner) of sixty-six years, two sons and a number of grandchildren.
Don Watson
Appreciation of Frank Graham, Published in North East History (Journal of the North East Labour History Society) no38 2007
Its not often that a parked car in Limerick makes me stop and look again. However this vehicle achieved that rarity, and prompted me to at long last get to grips with the complexities of the camera embedded for some reason, (probably for occasions such as this I suppose) in my mobile phone. The photo remained embedded within the memory of the phone, until I worked out how to get it out, and that involved emailing it to myself. Oh how things have moved on since the days of the humble Trabbi, with its two stroke engine and its minimalist interior comforts. I undertook a trip from Berlin to a far away destination in the DDR in a Trabant, and I was struck throughout that it was unlikely to afford any significant protection in the event of a collision of even the most minor sort. Thankfully this did not occur, although the lady driving this vehicle at one point did seem to be hell-bent on sending us both on to the big politburo in the sky, when she raced to overtake an NVA (National Volks Armie) lorry on what I recall was a sort of pontoon bridge.Meanwhile, a large soviet made lorry bore down with relentless and undoubtedly utterly unstoppable speed in the lane we were now occupying for what seemed an aeon. The two-stroke engine of the Trabbi reached a screaming pitch of insane hysteria, and we just swerved in front of the NVA lorry in a split second before we were splattered on the huge radiator of the oncoming Russian lorry. Now that Trabant's first cousin seems to be living in Limerick here in Ireland, and is apparently much loved by its student owner for its extreme fuel economy, although the noise of its engine is still something of a shock. Astonishingly the owner did not know,where the car came from, so I started to tell the astonishing story behind her remarkable little car...'once upon a time a long long time ago in a country now almost forgotten, under a socio-economic system now replaced by capitalism....'
U.S. forces claim to have killed 19 insurgents, but also admit that in this action they have also massacred 15 women and children in air strikes north of Iraq's capital in an action thay said was targeting suspected leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq, late on Thursday.
Warmest of congratulations to former Communist Party member, Doris Lessing, for being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an absolutely splendid choice and most thoroughly well deserved. All Communists, Socialists and Progressives will welcome this recognition one of the foremost writers of the 20th Century. Doris fell out with the organised Communist movement, on principled and well thought through grounds, but unlike many who left the CP in that period, did not degenerate into reactionary thinking.She has also contributed enormously to feminist thought through her literature.Some of her depictions of some of more chauvinist and reactionary attitudes prevalent amongst many men in the Communist movement, were painfully accurate, and still appeared to be relevant when I first encountered her writings in the late 1970's. Doris remains a broadly progressive voice in relation to matters of world peace, and anti-racism and social progress.The Swedish academy's announcement was stunning even by the standards of Nobel judges, who have been known for such surprises as Austria's Elfriede Jelinek and Italy's Dario Fo.
