Obituary: Tom Smith, life-long activist

By Darrall Cozens

Left Horizons, its readers and supporters, are saddened to hear of the death of Tom Smith, a member of Newport West Labour Party. We are grateful to Darrall Cozens for the following tribute to Tom, incorporating into the text some additional notes by Dave Nellist and with some comments from Mark Langabeer.

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My good friend and comrade Tom Smith, who I had known for more than 50 years, has passed away and he will be sorely missed. He was a generous, warm hearted, loveable man who was also very intelligent, astute and eccentric.

Throughout his life his needs were secondary. He gave to others and expected nothing in return. Even when he suffered serious let-downs in his private life, he never bore malice towards those who had let him down. He gave his love to the woman to whom he was once married and despite the marriage ending, his love for her was undying.

He never sought personal comfort from life and lived with the minimum he needed, carefully balancing out his daily needs so that he could leave behind a legacy for his daughter. And it was not only his love on a personal level that he gave but also, he dedicated his adult life to the needs of working class people.

AUEW convenor at a Leyland subsidiary

He was won to the banner of Marxism in his early 20s and remained true to his principles all his life, despite increasing ill health restricting his direct involvement in the movement. He was an active trade unionist, becoming AUEW convener at a Leyland subsidiary, and was a long-time member of the Labour Party.

For him the cause of socialism had to be fought for where working class people were active – the trade unions and the Labour Party. He was once a Labour councillor in Coventry serving for one term of four years. It could have been longer but halfway through his term of office in the 1980s he was being forced to carry out cuts in social services which would hit-working class people. He refused and stood down.

At the time there were three Labour councillors who supported the ideas of the Militant newspaper. Tom is the second one to pass away this year, the other being John Mutton. Tom was very well read and not only devoured the ideas of Marxism but also understood them and spent his time seeking to make those ideas accessible to a wider audience, trying to simplify what at times seemed to be complicated concepts.

He had his own short version of ‘The Great Money Trick’. A series of questions to a worker, revealed line by line, asking about being in favour of better wages, shorter hours, longer holidays, better pensions and so on, and then the final reveal – that if you answered ‘yes’ to all of the questions, you were in favour of changing society – “You Are A Communist”.

Infinite patience and careful listener

He almost always ended up his discussions and contributions with the self-effacing – “well, that’s the way that I see it”. He had infinite patience, listened carefully to what was said, considered all and then made his contribution. He never created barriers between himself and others, as he had the firm conviction that the majority of ordinary people could be won to the ideas of socialism if the ideas were explained in an accessible manner.

Tom had an in-depth grasp of economics. He had come to the Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry in the early 1970s to do a degree in Business Studies but the method and content of the ideas on the course alienated him so he did the bare minimum ending up with a 3rd class Honours. It was only later in life when he applied for and got a job teaching A Level Economics to a 6th Form in Ilford that he bothered to pick up his degree certificate.

At the time of this teaching he was living in Essex and his commute to work was two hours each way. He, like me, fell into teaching late in life, yet it was a job that he should have taken up much earlier as he had a gift for it. His working life took him from the steel industry in the name of GKN, to the stores in the Alvis subsidiary of Self Changing Gears to his final job as a teacher.

At Self Changing Gears, he sold the Militant and carried out solidarity work, for example, putting socialist/trade union material into boxes of components destined for the Leyland subsidiary in apartheid South Africa! Tom was well respected by other union stewards, becoming the chair of the shop stewards combine of one of the four British Leyland divisions – Special Products – which included around a dozen smaller businesses, including Coventry Climax, where another Militant supporter was T&G convener.

Tom was eccentric in manner and dress but he had a heart of gold. His intelligence and abilities enabled him to become at one time the chess champion for Gwent. He was an excellent bridge player and at one time four of us spent many a night through playing bridge. Tom hadn’t needed to touch his student grant in his first term at Lanchester Poly, surviving well on his card winnings. He was also a very accomplished blues harmonica player.

Sense of humour, quirkiness and solid commitment

It was no coincidence that in the 1970s three of the four flats above the Sheet Metal Workers Union offices in Coundon Road in Coventry were occupied by Tom, Dave Nellist and myself. And Tom’s legacy? His wonderful daughter, his contribution to our movement, his sense of humour, his quirkiness, his devotion to friends and comrades, his modesty and his willingness to laugh at his actions even when he suffered.

At one time Tom and I were playing rugby for the Lanchester third team. Tom was full back and the opposing team punted the ball up. Tom shouted that it was his but as the ball neared him, it was obvious that it was going over his head so he turned to catch it and ran into the posts splitting his forehead open. Blood everywhere, the ambulance came and Tom just laughed.

That was Tom. A lovely man, friend, and comrade. His last few years were dogged by ill health. He had had an operation for bowel cancer and had to have a stoma bag fitted. That severely restricted his social and political life for he feared going out as access to public toilet facilities were limited due to cuts and he was always worried that he may have an accident. And he never complained. His needs were always secondary. That was Tom.

Mark Langabeer writes:

In the last few years Tom had been a regular attender at Left Horizons physical meetings, until Covid, and when physical meetings were not possible, at the Zoom meetings. In both he was able to draw on his wealth of experience – and the solid grounding in political theory that came with supporting Militant in the old days – to make very cogent contributions to meetings.

The fact that Tom gravitated towards Left-Horizons, in the early days a political tendency with few supporters and little resources, is a testament to his commitment and to the grounding in Marxism he gained from Militant. He saw political ideas as far more important than the size or ‘kudos’ of a political group.

Because of his decades-long experience as a trade unionist, he showed a profound understanding of the labour movement and in particular what made workers ‘tick’: what ideas, fears and hopes courses through their veins and he always offered ways of approaching issues that could strike the right chord. He had a deep understanding of the British labour movement and its relationship with the ideas of Marxism. He will be sorely missed.