COMMUNIST AND NATIONAL UNEMPLOYED WORKESâ MOVEMENT LEADER
James âJimâ Ancrum was born on 15 August 1898 in Felling-on-Tyne, now part of the metropolitan borough of Gateshead. His parents were James, a road labourer, and Martha nĂ©e Mills. The family included many staunch Methodists. He started work underground at a local colliery as a boy and at the age of sixteen, in 1915, he volunteered for the Royal Navy and served for the rest of the war. During the minersâ lockout of 1926, Ancrum joined the Communist Party, a decision that caused a permanent rift with some of his respectable, Methodist relatives. The 1926 lockout featured a rapid expansion in Communist Party membership in the Durham coalfield, more than in any other, but then an equally rapid decline. He was part of a small cadre who remained in the party and played a significant role in the National Unemployed Workersâ Movement (NUWM) in the region during the inter-war years.
Ancrum gained both a national and an international reputation for his organising role with Workersâ International Relief during the lock-out at Dawdon Colliery, County Durham, in 1929. This was a particularly significant dispute for the Communist Party because it was an opportunity to implement the âclass against classâ strategy which had recently been adopted by the Communist International. At Dawdon the Durham Minersâ Association (DMA) Executive was amenable to accepting the inferior wages and conditions offered by the management whilst the local lodge was not; for the Communist Party this was an opportunity to promote its revolutionary leadership in opposition to the official union structure.
Workersâ International Relief (WIR) was a Comintern initiative that was intended to prevent workers who were on strike from being starved back to work. Ancrum described how the national committee of the WIR had made a ÂŁ30 donation to start a feeding centre for the miners and their families. A local committee, initially opposed by lodge and DMA officials as a communist front, organised the centre with the help of the local Co-operative Society. Funds were then raised by collections and concerts that involved the local community as well as appeals to trade union branches around the country. Over fifteen weeks, until the Dawdon miners returned after a partial victory, 14,880 meals were served and 1200 food parcels were distributed to workers and their families. According to Ancrum this showed that âthe workers cannot rely on the trade union machine to prevent them from starving during a strike. They must have their own commissariat, the W.I.RâŠâ [Ancrum (1929)]. This of course was entirely in line with the âclass against classâ position, but at the same time the feeding centre has been recognised as being instrumental in allowing the dispute to continue.
Ancrum was appointed by the 11th Congress of the Communist Party to its Central Committee in December 1929. He served until 1932, whilst also spending time from some point in 1931 until 1932 at the International Lenin School in Moscow. The 11th Congress was the second held by the party in 1929, the Comintern believing that the members of the Central Committee agreed at the 10th, at the beginning of the year, were insufficiently committed to the âclass against classâ policy. Ancrum proved loyal to this policy for as long as it was required of him. He repeated his WIR role in organising soup kitchens and feeding centres during the textile disputes in Lancashire in 1930. In that year he was a leader of the Tyneside contingent of a Hunger March to London. This march, held only a year after an earlier National Hunger March and organised despite the reservations of the NUWM leadership, attracted less than half of the target number of marchers and Tyneside was no exception.
In the early 1930s Ancrum was also secretary of the Durham Minersâ Minority Movement, speaking at pit-head meetings and trying with little success to build a membership in the coalfield. The Executive of the DMA had been in a bitter feud with the Communist Party since the 1926 lock-out, and the Minority Movement pushing the âclass against classâ critique of the union leadership exacerbated the situation. In 1931, Ancrum was temporarily expelled from the union for Minority Movement activity, although the specific offence was âdealing with Lodge business in Felling Squareâ [DMA Executive Committee Minutes, 14 July 1931]. Although the available evidence points to his loyalty to the Communist Party leadership, the Minutes of the Central Committee of 15 March 1931 record a contribution which also outlined his approach to locality working:
Before I joined the Party I used to back gee-gees, fill in the football coupon and go to the pub. But when I joined the Party I thought I had to stop doing this and only associate with Communists. But we must associate with people who back gee-gees, fill in the football coupon and go to the pub. Find out whatâs troubling them and raise it as an election issue⊠we must not only deal with national issues but get definitely on to the big issues affecting the workers in the localities [Communist Party, Minutes of Central Committee Meeting, 15 March 1931].
There are echoes here of Methodism in this account of his life-style conversion on joining the Communist Party. There is also a clear sign of what was to make him a force in the Felling area: the focus on what local people defined as major issues and the need to engage with them.
Ancrum was elected as a Communist councillor to Felling Urban District Council at a by-election in 1935. This local authority was solidly Labour and it was his third attempt at a seat in his own West Ward; he consolidated his position two years later. Ancrumâs electoral progress in Felling over a six-year period indicates his increasing presence in the area, as can be seen from the election reports in his local newspaper Heslopâs Local Advertiser, and the Newcastle Journal. In 1931, in a field of six candidates for three seats, he secured 12% of the votes cast. Three years later, with five candidates for the seats, he secured 16%. At the by-election in 1935 he was elected with 66% of the vote against one Labour rival. In 1937, in a field of five candidates, he was re-elected with 23% of the vote, again defeating a Labour rival. Although he was never successful in the Durham County Council elections, he nevertheless achieved a noticeable increase in his share of the vote over the same period. In 1934 in a field of three candidates for one seat he won 18% of the vote and 29% three years later.
West Ward was one of the poorest in the authority and had the highest rate of over-crowded housing. Ancrumâs increasing success was the result not just of persistent electoral campaigning in the same ward but of meticulous local advice and advocacy work. He was a leading figure in the Felling branch of the NUWM and a speaker at regular outdoor meetings, where he described his extensive casework on benefits advice and appeals over rents, repairs, and preventing evictions. Ancrum organised the funding and equipment for the Felling contingent on a Means Test protest march to Durham in 1932 and led the Felling and Gateshead campaigns against the new benefit scales introduced by the 1934 Unemployment Assistance Act. This campaign involved 1000-strong indoor rallies in a local cinema, and a march estimated at 15,000 strong to the Unemployment Assistance Board Area Office. Ancrum secured a commitment from the manager not to reduce benefit scales where children were receiving free school meals, a review of cases where âunfair advantageâ was being taken of the Act, and agreement that central government would be notified about the protest. This was part of the national movement that forced the government to temporarily withdraw benefits cuts. However, his local paper noted after his first election success that âThis contest appears to have been fought on an individual and not a political basis ⊠Councillor Ancrum is well-known throughout the district and this no doubt accounts for his remarkable victoryâ [Heslopâs Local Advertiser, 18 October 1935]. In other words it was not his communist politics that attracted the voters, but his local efforts on their behalf over benefits, housing issues, and council policies.
Ancrumâs council work was largely an extension of his NUWM work. As well as taking opportunities to campaign against the Means Test and benefits levels, he took up local dissatisfaction about council housing and job schemes, and campaigned for more transparency in council business and for a points system in council house allocation. At one point the district Communist Party officials had to warn him against making accusations of corruption and favouritism in council affairs unless he had firm evidence. At the same time he had a national presence in the NUWM, speaking and helping to create branches around the country, and with his name and position as âNational Organiserâ on the organisationâs headquarters letterhead. Nevertheless the NUWM in the North East of England, as in many other areas of the country, was isolated from the mainstream labour movement for much of the 1930s. Ancrum was involved in organising the Tyneside contingent for the 1934 Hunger March, but the effort was later criticised by NUWM leaders for having to make up the numbers with âunreliable, bad typesâ rather than the trade unionists who were the target participants. Although trade union participation had improved considerably two years later, and Ancrum had been instrumental in raising funds for the marchers in the Felling area, he failed to persuade Felling Urban District Council to support the 1936 Hunger March. His Labour colleagues fell into line with their partyâs official opposition to such communist initiatives.
Local elections were suspended for the duration of the war and Ancrum served on Felling UDC from 1935 until his death in 1946. His was one of only five local authority seats to be taken by Communist candidates in the north-east of England during the inter-war period; like Ancrum, the other councillors were all well-known local activists in the NUWM. This appears to have been the case in other parts of Britain too. The fact that the small numbers of communists elected to local authorities in Britain were almost invariably local NUWM figures is a testament to the effectiveness of their advice and advocacy work. The Communist Party recognised at the time that such local electoral success was the result of campaigning work by individuals, but that this was not being translated into wider support for the party: âthe workers see too much done by councillors as individuals and not enough by them as Party membersâ [Communist Party, Report of the Fifteenth Party Congress 1938]. Ancrumâs local paper had already made a similar observation. During the Second World War Ancrum served as an Air Raid Precautions warden in Felling, a role which communists developed as a means to monitor and take up local issues and grievances. He formally withdrew from the NUWM in 1940, with a suddenness that is known to have confused such leadership of the organisation as still remained; it is not clear what the reasons were, although by that stage the political circumstances that had produced the NUWM had changed completely.
Ancrum had acquired a command of Russian during his year at the Lenin School and that was the first of several visits to the Soviet Union. It is possible (although this must be conjecture) that his knowledge of the language gave him a greater opportunity to appreciate what was really taking place there during the 1930s. If so there is no public evidence that he expressed any disquiet about it. It is known that the NUWM leaders Wal Hannington and Harry MacShane had several major disagreements with the Comintern loyalists in the Communist Party leadership over the direction of the unemployed movement. What role, if any, Ancrum played is not known and neither is his position during the policy disputes. His career as an activist lasted twenty years and witnessed the major Comintern-imposed policy shifts of the CPGB, all of which he seems to have accommodated.
Ancrum had married Frances J. Gibbon in June 1920, a Felling Communist Party activist, and they had no children. He died in 1946 of complications following an operation and after a communist funeral was buried at St Maryâs Church, Heworth. After his death the Labour Party re-captured his West Ward seat and the Communists were never represented again on Felling Urban District Council. In many respects Ancrum represents a good example of the âlocal tribunesâ produced by the Communist Party between the wars. He would have been to a large extent an ideal role model of the time: rooted in his own community and sharing its privations, selflessly active, an effective negotiator and open-air speaker, a natural leader whose abilities were honed through party training and education. His achievements as an NUWM leaderâand in winning local electionsâwere substantial in a region where the CP membership was consistently the smallest of any district in Britain. Nevertheless âlocal tribunesâ operated within the context of the topâdown organisation that was the Communist International. Jim Ancrum was one of those who had to balance the needs of the people among whom he worked with the demands of a political leadership whose priorities were determined elsewhere.
DON WATSON
