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Friday, September 28, 2018

Obituary: W. Griffiths (1977)

Obituary from the March 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

We recently learned with regret of the death of this veteran member. S. Goldstein writes:

It came as a great shock to me. I had for some time thought that if a loyal and consistent comrade is needed in East London to help revitalize that area with Socialist propaganda. Griffiths is that person. Alas, our comrade died only three or four Sundays after I last spoke to him at the Hackney Library. He had borrowed two books on Marx and, on encountering me, showed them to me and displayed rapt attention to conversation about them.

Comrade Griffiths had joined the SPGB in 1929, about two years before I joined. We were both in the East London branch, and he became a member of Hackney branch later. I would run into him in all kinds of places — getting a bus from Hackney Baths, at Whipps Cross (he told me his sister lived nearby) and on Sunday mornings in Club Row market. He would invariably acquaint me with all that was going on, and he was sympathetic whenever I expressed personal difficulties to him. He was never falsch to me.

His genuineness arose not only from his character but from an absolute intellectual conviction that, the sneers of renegades notwithstanding, the party in which we met — the SPGB — was the only party for the working class. As long as I live I shall remember him with respect and affection.
Solomon Goldstein

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