Parliamentary Fund (1937)

Party News from the July 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

Donations to New Publications Fund. (1927)

Party News from the October 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Publications Fund. (1926)

Party News from the October 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

Obituaries: Jim Peterson and Cde Hollingshead (1942)

Obituaries from the September 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

Old timers of the S.P. of Canada are rapidly passing away. News has come to hand of the death of Jim Peterson, of Vancouver, and Comrade Hollingshead, of Calgary.

Jim was taciturn, well informed and faithful; his place will be hard to fill. He spoke little but always to the point, and never failed to be on hand when help was needed.

“Holly” was of a different type, blithe and lively. He always met a comrade with a welcoming smile. His house was ever open, and, together with his wife, he did a lot to encourage members of the Party during periods of strain. We extend our sympathy to Mrs. Hollingshead in her bereavement and to Canadian comrades in their great loss.

Charles Lestor

Agnes Hollingshead

From The Monument by Robert Barltrop:

The Party was saved from an extreme predicament (one section of the membership saw nothing else but to sell the newly-acquired Head Office) by old Mrs Hollingshead. I went to see her in Edinburgh, and told her we needed several hundred pounds to pay the bills: she gave a thousand. Agnes Hollingshead was one of the most remarkable of people. At this time, she was ninety-two. She had run a commercial college in Calgary for several years, came to Britain in the nineteen-thirties and set up again in Edinburgh. After her husband’s death early in the war her sole wish became to amass a small fortune and leave it to the Party. She continued working until she died — her only concession to age was to give up classes and take individual pupils instead. On the day I arrived she was taking a girl of seventeen or so, dictating shorthand and correcting exercises with briskness and authority.

Besides having the school, she let out the rooms in her house to families: they paid only modest rents, but reading the Socialist Standard was a condition of tenancy. Her teaching-room was a huge room at the front of the house, and she lived in the kitchen at the back with a cat named Karl Marx. A tiny, dignified woman, she had an indomitable zest for living. She attributed her age and her fine teeth to ‘plain living and high thinking’ and to vegetarianism, and confided to me that she was worried by shortness of breath when she walked up the steep hill by her house: ‘I’ll go to the man at the nature-cure clinic,’ she said, ‘because it isn’t natural to be puffing like that.’ She died at ninety-six, and left nearly four thousand pounds to the SPGB.

The Monument: the Story of the Socialist Party of Great Britain by Robert Barltrop (Pluto Press, 1975) Page 161

Obituary: A. Hollingshead (1959)

Obituary from the August 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mrs. Agnes Hollingshead died in Edinburgh at the age of 91 years. This old Comrade was, for many years, active in the old Socialist Party of Canada. When a younger woman, she spoke in Calgary and Toronto. Last year, in a recorded message to the World Socialist Party Conference at Boston, U.S.A., she said it was still her ambition at the age of 90 to go on the Soap-box.

Mrs. Hollingshead was a very talented woman. She ran a business college in Calgary, and on her return to the “Old Country” in the 1920’s taught languages, shorthand-typing, and music. Her home in Edinburgh was made freely available to any member and sympathiser. She was the Edinburgh Group secretary up to within a few months of her death. Her keenness and enthusiasm for Socialist propaganda in her sprightly old age is an object lesson to young members. If anything, she became more active as she became older.

Mrs. Hollingshead was very generous to the S.P.G.B. When funds were lower than usual a few years ago she came to the rescue with a substantial donation. Members affectionately referred to her as “the old lady from Edinburgh”—a kind of Socialist institution. Comrades from Overseas always made their way to her home, and she had a warm welcome for everyone. Her greatest difficulty in recent years was her inability to get to the Mound where the outdoor meetings were held by members from Glasgow.

Socialism kept Mrs. Hollingshead young in heart. She looked to the future with that irrepressible optimism possessed only by Socialists. Hers was a useful life.

Some Members (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The history of the Socialist Party is of the men and women who have made it. Remarkable as many of them have been, there are no high places or orders of merit. All Socialists are equal, and none is more equal than others. The jokey justification for obituaries in the SOCIALST STANDARD is that this is all anyone gets from the Party. Not true, of course: we get marvelous camaraderie, and loyalty and the job well done are appreciated. Nevertheless, the point is made.

Several thousand people have played their parts over seventy years, and we still have members—several—who joined before the first world war. Inevitably the speakers come to mind first. Anderson and Fitzgerald of the Impossibilist generation, who set their different stamps on the Party, are mentioned elsewhere. There was Neumann, who wore a frock-coat to Paris Commune meetings, translated Kautsky, and composed an awful Party song—in Germany when the 1914 war began, he was killed in the Spartacus Rising. Freddie Watts, wood-carver and designer. And a little later Kohn, full of knowledge and wit, and Moses Baritz, whose terrifying rumbustiousness made incongruous the fact that he was a scholar and broadcaster on music.

They were all rumbustious in argument. Ted Lake recalled in 1954 his first sight of Fitzgerald, pushing through the crowd at a meeting and roaring: "I demand to take the platform and speak in opposition!" R. M. Fox in his autobiography Smokey Crusade described EC meetings about 1910 in the room above the shop in Sandland Street, with late-night passers-by "looking up at the windows and wondering when the disputants in the brawl would come to blows". A few fell out with the Party. One, sadly after thirty-five years, was sincere and kindly Jacomb; and with him Reynolds, who spoke and wrote with abrasive erudition.

But none of them was thought, or claimed to be, a speciality. The best speakers took their turn on the rota like the beginners, doing the bad spots equally with the good ones; the platform has always been the Party's, not individuals'. And members who did unspectacular work in Branches and on dull committees were and are valued as highly as anyone. Percy Hallard, who was a Branch secretary for thirty-eight years; Jack Butler, who was the Party treasurer and had an account-book in his lap and a pencil behind his ear when he was killed in an air-raid shelter; the general secretaries—Freddie Adams, Merrison, Hilda Kohn.

There have been others who toiled away for years in unlikely places and circumstances. Dick Jacobs in Swansea until a Branch was formed there; Jonathan Roe in High Wycombe; Lamond and the amazing Agnes Hollingshead in Edinburgh; Eric Boden in Sheffield; and a good many more. Or the members like old Beck who have spent years going round with Socialist literature and selling it at street-corners in all weathers, and those who were always there to carry the platform.

We have never lacked such members. Ever since Great Dover Street there has always been tea and something to eat at the Party office (Conferences as well) because we have had bricks of people who would forgo the excitement to make that their job: Nellie Butler, Mark Miller, Helen Rose, Joe Bell. In that connection, the Socialist Party has never been a "man's world". Women have been EC members, speakers and delegates, without any of us finding implications in it. (Others do, of course. A local paper once wrote up one of our platform people as a "raven-haired, barb-tongued beauty"; we thought she was simply an able speaker.) One of our saddest losses was Lisa Bryan's early death in 1960.

There have been members whom no-one who kew them could ever forget. Charles Lestor—he looked like the redskin chief of a schoolboy's dream, and breathed adventure in tales of Jack London and the Yukon. Clifford Groves of the autocratic manner, flaying opponents in debate. Alf Jacobs, who spoke Sunday in Victoria Park for almost a lifetime. McLaughlin, full of enthusiasm when he was blind and deaf.

Writers are relatively obscure though their work is the most lasting, their initials and pen-names often a mystery. "F.F." stood for years of lucid, well-informed articles in the STANDARD; not so many know today that it stood also for Fred Foan. Some of the most delightful writing which ever appeared was the penetrative, gently witty pieces by "W.T.H.", the initials of Hopley. We have with us today two whose work spans longer than most of us have lived. Comrades McClatchie ("Gilmac") and Hardy ("H") have written for the SOCIALIST STANDARD since, respectively, just before and just after the 1914-18 war and edited it for forty and thirty-plus years.

Last year a still-active member was eighty, and a bunch of comrades went round to her with a birthday cake and a lot of good wishes. She said that though she hadn't seen the establishment of Socialism, working for it had given her a lifetime among the best people imaginable. Even when we are disagreeing with one another, that is what we all think.

Robert Barltrop