Review: Somerset Socialist Library

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 73 (Summer 2021)]

Some readers of the newsletter may be familiar with Dave Chapple, a veteran trade union activist but also a socialist historian. He has published a series of volumes in his Somerset Socialist Library mainly about the south-west. 

The link between activism and socialist history is of course one that particularly interests the LSHG since it’s a key part of our premise - robustly researched history influenced by the perspectives of political activism. 

One of Dave Chapple’s recent publications is a record of the life Keith Howard Andrews. He died at the age of 101 in 2008, and Chapple was privileged to be able to meet and interview him towards the end of his life when he still remained an active socialist. 

The book is a record of the life of a working-class socialist, and anti-imperialist. In the modern era, from the 1960s, Andrews might have ended up at University, become a student activist and led a life on the left of a rather different kind to the one he did. When Andrews grew up in the 1920s that choice was rarely available to working people. 

He led a life doing a range of jobs but at the core was his military experience. Again, to a modern generation, this might seem odd but at that time it was one of the relatively few opportunities for regular employment. Andrews was in Quetta, India and then Shanghai as a British soldier and the racism and class prejudice he experienced clearly did much to shape his politics. 

He ended up volunteering for the International Brigades in 1936 and was one of those who fought Franco’s fascists. Yet Andrews was not a soldier with a gun killing people. He was rather precisely the reverse. He was a medic who throughout his varied military service was dedicated to saving lives.

 Andrews was back in England from 1931 living in Kilburn. He had joined the Communist Party and did a range of jobs. He determined to go to Spain in August 1936 and was there until early 1938. His memories of the International Brigade may be of particular interest. On his return from Spain, as he was classified as an army reservist, he joined up again and found himself at Dunkirk. 

He survived the entire war, avoiding life threatening situations, partly through illness. After the war he eventually found work from the mid-1950s with the NHS in Somerset. He remained both a union activist and a Communist until he retired in 1972. 

Memoirs and biographies of working people flourished in the 1970s and 1980s from local and regional community presses. In the 2020s they seem again a comparatively neglected area. Dave Chapple’s record of Keith Howard Andrews’ life is a welcome reminder that accounts of working lives can recall a world we have lost, but also, in terms of union organisation and politics, a world we need to build anew.

 Keith Flett 

For more details and how to get a copy of this book see here: 

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