Dave Spencer was a longstanding socialist activist based in Coventry. RCN members only came into brief contact with Dave, at a meeting of the Socialist Alliance and later of the commune. Whilst very much a committed activist in his own locality, Dave also contributed a great deal to attempts to being about principled socialist unity, particularly by challenging sectarian organisations and sectarian behaviour. We are pleased to print this brief outline of Dave’s life by Mark Harrison from the commune.
It was with great sadness that we learnt of the death of our comrade Dave Spencer on the night of Tuesday 24th, less than a week short of his 72nd birthday. Many shocked friends and comrades have written to us remembering his personal warmth and good humour, even when debating passionate issues, as he did so recently, he did so in a composed and relaxed manner that forced you to think more clearly and raise the level of your own argument. Dave’s life touched many outside traditional left wing circles, as an exponent of radical pedagogy he put his ideas into action in Coventry by running an adult education course, going out in the council estates of Coventry to teach parents in primary schools English, Maths, Psychology, cooking etc.
In Dave’s own words during a recent debate “My way of teaching English was to discuss a controversial topic for an hour or so to get everybody thinking. The women would then go home and write down their thoughts or experiences. Grammar could come later. One of the favourite topics was “All men are bastards. Discuss”. One day the women of my class in Bell Green came in to discuss the proposed closure of their local Primary School. What to do? I seem to remember suggesting in an abstract way occupation and joining the local Labour Party to get rid of their councillors. Three days later, on the front page of the local paper there was an article “Parents occupy Bell Green Primary School” and there in the picture were the smiling faces of my students!”
As Dave would say, truly ‘communism from below’.
In later life Dave became chair of his local residents’ group and managed to secure national lottery funding to build a play area for the children in the park. He told a recent aggregate of the commune that this felt like the biggest achievement he was ever a part of in politics and was very moved by the experience.
Dave was a revolutionary for over 50 years, in which time he was a constant champion of the rank-and-file ‘from below’ through factory bulletins and organising local discos but was also prepared to stand up to petty bureaucrats.
One of the final unity campaigns Dave was involved in was the Campaign for a Marxist Party, where he saw that the CPGB wanted to wreck the initiative after they had gained all they could from it, as the SWP did in the Socialist Alliance.
As one comrade remembers, “At one conference of the campaign the CPGB brought a hand raising mob, some of whom had joined days before and some who were not even members. Jack Conrad of the CPGB ignored the chair (Dave) and signalled that the verbal abuse and nonsense could begin. Dave raised himself to his full height and stature and put courtesy aside as inappropriate and bellowed ‘sit down and shut up you silly boy!’ This caused the self-styled hard Bolshevik to look rather upset and one of his supporters called for the chair to show some respect. In response, Dave, in his best headmasterly voice’ explained that first he would have to have respect for others….
On another occasion during a national committee meeting, two comrades drank two pints of beer each over four hours. The next issue of the Weekly Worker had a very large pint of Guinness next to an article on the committee that implied the committee were all drunks. I wrote hundreds of words denouncing the CPGB. But Dave simply said, ‘A cult creates its own reality’. Exactly”
We in the commune hope to republish some of David’s articles in memory of him. Below is a message from David on the failure of the left.
“On the SWP’s “Left Unity” initiative, I don’t see why we can’t afford to ignore it – the electorate certainly will. The main reason for the vacuum on the Left is the behaviour of the SWP and SP. They destroyed both the Socialist Alliance which had over 90 candidates in the 2001 general election and the Scottish Socialist Party which had over 70 candidates in 2001. Neither group can stand any rivals or any form of democracy. The SWP could not keep Respect together and the SP were too frightened to launch the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party as a membership organisation in case they got outnumbered. I can’t believe they have changed their approach unless for tactical reasons.
The only way to beat the BNP is by consistent political work in working class communities – that is by building from below. In the recent County Council elections 3 comrades in Northampton put up as Save Our Public Services candidates. Dave Green got the best result in New Duston with 950 votes, 39.6% of the vote and 61 votes short of the incumbent Tory councillor. Harry Tuttle in Lumbertubs ward got 277 votes, 16.5% of the vote and Norman Adams in Delapre got 219 votes, 10.2% of the total. These are good results compared to the pitiful 0.9% for the NO2EU candidates in the European elections, all of whom must have lost their £5,000 deposits in each region.
The Northampton votes are the result of week by week campaigning to defend council housing, open public spaces and opposing the PFI building of schools.
Because of the economic recession there will be attacks on the living standards of the working class and certainly cuts in public services. There will be a need to build more community campaigns. This is where the Left should be. As I understand it the BNP’s tactics are to be visible and active in working class areas. That’s where we should defeat them not in some last minute unity scheme for the general election which will cost a lot of money and get nowhere.”
Mark Harrison, the commune
Memories of Dave Spencer ———– From Dave Green
It is difficult to know where to start when talking about Dave but I’ll just relate a couple of stories about him.
I first met Dave 50 Years ago on a ‘Hands off Cuba Demo in Coventry’ (during the threatened USA invasion of Cuba) in 1962.
It was down at the bottom of Hertford Street, Coventry, on an old bomb site – they were still about then before the building of the precinct, near the Bull Yard and the Three Tuns Pub, where the demo moved off from.
It was a big demo of a few hundred and I was with a contingent of Communist Party youth – the Young Communist League – who were fine but a bit serious and a little humourless, and I remember looking over at a bigger contingent of the Young Socialists, who were Trotskyists I was fearfully and whisperingly told, who seemed full of life, singing songs, playing guitars and chanting socialist slogans. A fairly alluring sight in contrast. But anyway it was there that Dave approached me, from the trots – spoke to me and got me —- and later reeled me in with talk of real social change and revolution -not the peaceful coexistence of Soviet bureaucrats or the stale staid reformism of Labour.
From then on it was CND, Aldermaston marches and support for the Vietnamese against American Imperialism for me and through Dave a closer aquaintance with ideas of how our society could and needed to change.
The result was that Dave became a real influence on me and it became that he was always a friend, as he was to so many of us – a guy you could talk politics with – or history or music and many other things – and how to change our world to a better Socialist one.
But while clearly there was in those days, a strong political line within Dave that sprang from a Marxist and Trotskyist perspective (he was to change more recently) Dave was never a doctrinaire who shut out discussion or a willingness to change if experience and ideas proved him wrong.
We all know of his warmth and genuine interest in his friends and his fabled love of anecdotes and the foibles of himself and his fellows, which is perhaps why he loved Dickens and Shakespeare. Not for him the dull uniformity of regimented socialists and an unimaginative acceptance of a sterile dogma. This approach got him into many arguments and spats with many of the socialist groups he joined or mingled with, who used to think – as his good friend Jack Williams, the fine old contrary trotskyist shop steward from the Jaguar/Daimler used to say – that they’d come down from the mountain with the ten leninist commandments carved on tablets of stone, and who weren’t going to brook any deviance from the party line.
On this theme, I well remember him, out on the street one evening after a meeting, being silenced and open mouthed (which didn’t happen often!) at a supporter of the group around the Militant newspaper, who when Dave expressed some doubt whether the socialist movement had the answers to environmental disaster, changes in the economy, consumerism and other issues, was told that all the solutions to the problems we faced in the world today were to be found in the pages of this group’s weekly newspaper and monthly theoretical magazine. – No wonder Dave was expelled from so many socialist groups and the Labour Party (twice I think – or was it three in the LP’s case?) as he challenged orthodoxy and dogma in his pursuit of ideas that could change the world for the better.
Dave as we’ve said had a profound interest in how ideas could change people and through them change the world. He was rightly proud of his adult education work, the schemes he introduced and pioneered, and the impact they had across the city and upon hundreds of adults who remember him with fond memories.
But Dave was not just a debater, an educator and a philosopher of radical ideas, he was an activist in the socialist movement who tried to put his ideas into practice through his work in that movement and wider community.
There was not much of ‘the remote academic in an ivory tower’ about Dave, although he could easily hold his own against such people and was well read and wrote a lot himself. For he was always down supporting those in struggle against injustice, those on the picket line and those opposing racism and sexism.
I remember him coming down to support a strike in Northampton where a mutual friend, and steward, had been sacked, and sitting down chatting with us and supporters about how he could help build support. — And on this theme of being a serious debater of socialist ideas but also of getting stuck into the everyday battles against injustice – I remember him smiling as he retold many a time an anecdote about how during the miners strike he was outside the Co-op in Earlsdon (in Coventry) high street collecting cash and food to send to the miners, probably with people here, and how he commented to a friend and supporter next to him, that one of the greatest Marxist theoreticians in the UK, who was a Professor at Warwick University, had just gone by and made a donation, and how the immediate reaction from the guy he’d told was that this Marxist can’t have been much of a Marxist if he wasn’t out here himself collecting with us for the miners and their cause! Dave thought that comment was ‘spot on’ – and that typified the view of Dave himself to life, ideas and involvement to change society.
So, we can all remember many, many stories about Dave and no doubt we’ll exchange them now and well into the future, and it’s with a heavy heart that we face that future without Him.
His closest, who he loved dearly, Corrine and family, His son John and his wife, his grandchildren and Margaret will miss him sorely and so will the rest of us —– But better to have known such a guy, a ‘good decent bloke’ in Dave’s language, even though we have now lost him, than not to have known him at all. Take care Dave — You did yourself and us proud….
Comrades,
The funeral was a fitting tribute to Dave, turnout of over 300 at the crematorium with the service done by Bob Jelley, who was one of Dave’s students at Caledon Castle School in the 1960s, and now he has retired from his career in education, is a humanist minister. It was standing room only – every seat was taken. Two comrades, Bob himself and Keith White spoke movingly of Dave’s importance in both education and politics and the fact that he absolutely refused to separate any of the aspects of his life and work from each other. Finally John Murray spoke about Dave’s sense of humour and his love of life.
The respect Dave is held in locally was shown by the article in the local paper in tribute to him which appeared the day before the funeral (a better response from the Coventry Evening Telegraph than he generally got when dealing with them!). I believe one of the journalists at BBC West Midlands is also working on a radio programme about his life. It is perhaps summed up by the response of his local printers (he was always a regular customer). When Corinne his wife went to get the Order of Service printed the folk behind the counter started crying when they heard Dave had died, and printed the booklet for free.
There is a collection for additional equipment for his last project – the local kids playground in the park a few yards from his house and the Council has agreed to put up a plaque commemorating the work he put into getting the plyground built.
Comrades at the wake a held at the Humber pub at the end of Dave’s street proposed that an annual political event should be organised in Coventry in his memory.
In Solidarity
Matthew