Prologue and Acknowledgements

To write a biography of Ted Grant is a daunting task. Although many people knew Ted and worked with him, very few ever got really close to him. In the course of a long and fruitful life, Ted played many roles. But he was actually rather a private person in some respects. He very rarely talked about his past and was reluctant to answer questions about it. His overriding concern was politics and he gave little importance to such matters.

I knew and worked closely with Ted Grant for all my adult life. Ted was the greatest influence over my political life and thought, and I believe I was the closest person to him. Before he died, Ted made Ana Muñoz and I his executors and gave us the rights to his writings. Ted’s elder sister Rae once told me: “You know my brother better than I do.” When she was alive, I had many conversations with Rae which provided a lot of biographical information. Sadly, Rae is no longer alive to receive my thanks, but I would like this book to serve as a tribute to her for all she did to give Ted moral (and material) support and encouragement in the most difficult moments of his life.

In the years I collaborated with Ted—almost half a century—I had many conversations with him and can remember many of the things he told me about himself. I have attempted to put these things together as completely as I can. However, these memoirs are necessarily incomplete. To gain a deeper insight I recommend the reader study Ted’s book The History of British Trotskyism and, in particular, his collected works, two volumes of which have already appeared, with a third in preparation.

This book is therefore the work of many people. That was inevitable because of the difficulty in assembling the material for the biography of a very remarkable man. Extremely valuable background material was provided by Rob Sewell, who has done more research on Ted’s life than anybody else and is extremely knowledgeable about the subject. Among other things, he interviewed Ted’s sister Rae, Millie Lee, who had come over from South Africa with Ralph Lee in 1937, as well as others who were close to Ted. This book has drawn extensively on his researches.

Another valuable source was the Ted Grant archive, which contain valuable unpublished interviews and correspondence. When Ted finally moved from the flat in Islington where he had lived for many years, a large number of letters were discovered in drawers. These were of all kinds: some personal—letters from members of his family—and some political, including many from his lifelong comrade and friend Jimmy Deane.

They all shed a fascinating light on Ted’s life, ideas and relationships. None of them, as far as I know, have ever been published before. I have decided to include the most interesting ones in their entirety. Although I am conscious of the fact that this may sometimes interrupt the flow of the narrative, this inconvenience is more than justified by their intrinsic interest.

Unfortunately, there are not so many letters written by Ted Grant himself. Probably many have been lost or destroyed. But I suspect there is also another reason. Ted was not the world’s most diligent letter writer. This can be seen by the repeated requests from Jimmy Deane and Ted’s relatives for letters, and also the fact that most of Ted’s letters that have survived commence with apologies for long silences.

The main reason for this, I believe, was not laziness or absent-mindedness, or even the pressures of work. There was another reason. Ted Grant was a perfectionist. Whereas others would be content just to write a few lines, Ted would wish to write a long political statement. This was time-consuming, and so the task of replying to a letter would be postponed from one day or week, or month, or year, to the next.

Many of the handwritten letters were often written in diabolical handwriting. I wish to thank Ana Muñoz for her patient and determined work in deciphering and typing out these old letters, to provide me with invaluable source material.

A lot of work on this correspondence was done by Francesco Merli, whose painstaking research into the Ted Grant archives in preparation for his Collected Writings, has uncovered valuable material that has never been published before. Among other things he discovered a handwritten letter from Ralph Lee to Ted dated 1948, which casts new light on what happened to him. Thanks also to Alun Morgan for his researches into Jimmy Deane’s archive at Warwick University and Jock Haston’s archive at Hull.

Even more recent investigations by Roy Grant (no relation) has shown that even when Ted spoke about his past, he was playing his cards close to his chest and being a little coy about his ancestry. The information provided by several ancestral websites made by surviving members of his family, shows that Ted had many more relatives than he ever let on. The data they collected, augmented by new findings made by Roy, has revealed far more about Ted’s relatives than he ever told us.

My thanks also are due to Fred Weston, Francesco Merli, Harry Whittaker and John Peterson for proofreading and making useful suggestions. Many thanks also to Niklas Albin Svensson and Ainhoa Murguiondo for their work on the layout and other technical matters, to Hamid Alizadeh for organizing the production and layout, and to Filip Staes, Ajmal Waqif and Mark Rahman for the cover design.

We have accumulated a number of pictures over the years and we are indebted to the following people for their help: Phil Lloyd, Rae Blank, Millie Haston, Ann Ward, Darrall Cozens, Adrian Jones, Alex Grant, Terry McPartlan, Lal Khan and Ana Muñoz.

For obvious reasons it was impossible to mention all the many comrades who worked with him over the years in Britain and internationally. To all those who remained loyal to Ted to the end I express my warmest gratitude, for they are in the final analysis the real protagonists of this book.

An unbroken thread

As soon as it became known that I was working on this book, comrades began to send me anecdotes about Ted. However, I have resisted the temptation to reproduce a long series of personal anecdotes, which would be easy to do, as Ted was rather eccentric, and even rejoiced in his eccentricities. But to give undue weight to this aspect would be to perpetrate a great injustice to the memory of a man who was, before all else, a very serious political figure.

In the Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History Hegel wrote scathingly about the kind of superficial biographies that seek to exploit the personal foibles and weaknesses of great men and reduce history to the level of gossip:

“No man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre,” is a well-known proverb; I have added—and Goethe repeated it ten years later—“but not because the former is no hero, but because the latter is a valet.” He takes off the hero’s boots, assists him to bed, knows that he prefers champagne, etc. Historical personages waited upon in historical literature by such psychological valets, come poorly off; they are brought down by these their attendants to a level with—or rather a few degrees below the level of—the morality of such exquisite discerners of spirits. (Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, § 34)

Although there are many personal memories of friends and comrades, those who only remember Ted Grant in terms of anecdotes miss the whole point of his life and work. However, I am conscious of the fact that a biography is not a history book and in addition to the historical data and political theory it must deal with the man. I have therefore included some anecdotes in the last section, but only insofar as they cast light on Ted’s character and life.

Ted always spoke of the unbroken thread that connects our Tendency to the ideas and traditions of Marxism, which we can trace through the RCP and the WIL, right back to the International Left Opposition. He told me that before the Second World War, there was an old comrade in our ranks who had been a member of the First, Second, Third and Fourth Internationals.

I never met that man, of course. But in the course of my life I have met several splendid comrades who had been members of the RCP. Their firm grasp of Marxist theory and unshakable belief in socialism and the revolutionary mission of the proletariat always struck me as something especially admirable. Sadly, most are no longer with us. One of the few surviving members of that remarkable generation is that redoubtable veteran, comrade Bill Landles in Tyneside.

Ted Grant was and still remains the personification of the unbroken thread that links the present generation with the rich tradition that stretches back through the Left Opposition to the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, and before that to Marx and Engels. However, today, one hundred years after his birth, Ted Grant is not just a symbol. He always played a most active and leading role in the movement, where he not only defended the ideas of Marxism, but developed and enriched them in a profound and creative manner. His writings provide us with a rich treasury of ideas and cast light on the burning questions of our epoch.

The impact of his ideas and work went far beyond the narrow confines of small left groupings. When Ted Grant died almost seven years ago, obituaries were published in all the main bourgeois papers in Britain, including The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent. This fact alone demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that this man, whether you agreed or disagreed with him, made an indelible mark on British politics.

In writing this book I am, at least in part, paying a debt to the man who taught me everything I know about Marxism and whose ideas I continue to defend—ideas that have withstood the test of time and provide a solid basis on which the new generation can build. On the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, I offer my recollections of this great man as a modest contribution to the understanding of the new generation, the people whom Ted always prized the most.

Ted, who had an irrepressible sense of humour, did not spare his opponents in private conversation. However, at bottom, even his jokes and little comments usually had a political basis. He lived and breathed politics, that is to say, Marxist, revolutionary politics, which always was foremost in his mind, even in the unlikeliest contexts.

It is that political aspect that I have concentrated on, for the simple reason that Ted Grant was a political animal. More than anybody else, one can say of Ted Grant: ideas were the man, and the man was his ideas. By this, I do not mean he was indifferent to other things, to literature, science and the lives of people. On the contrary, Ted, like old Engels, was a marvellous human being. His motto might well have been the famous quotation by the Roman writer Terence: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a human being. I consider nothing that is human alien to me”.

London, March 2013