John Clayden

My father Harry Clayden was born in 1905 his mother my grandmother was born in the poor house  where her mother , who was a servant girl , was  incarcerated. My grandmother later married dad’s father who was a carter who died in a flu epidemic just before the first world war . At thirteen my father had to leave school to work in a grocers shop to support his widowed mother.

He told me that at the end of the war  the first political activity that he got involved in was a local campaign by returning demobbed soldiers. Their objective was to close down the local poor house in Leytonstone in the East End where he lived. The campaign was directed by a returning army  major . The strategy was to surround the poor house with enough well organised people to stop it functioning and to block the board of governors from attending their meetings in the building. He told me the whole thing employed military tactics to outwit the police organised by the Major. It was a successful campaign and the poor house was shut down. 

Regrettably I never got to know my grandmother as she along with my aunt and uncle and two siblings were all killed by a bomb in the second world war not that long after I was born in 1939.
They were staying with us awaiting evacuation .The bomb hit the Anderson air raid  shelter where they were sheltering, where we were living  in Odessa Road Wandsworth.  My mother and I were visiting  my other granny  in East Ham and fortunately for us missed it. My cousin who was in the house survived and she came to live with us.

My father who was a lifelong member of the Communist Party, worked as a grocery worker and was active in the shop workers union NUDAW which later became USDAW . He became attracted to the communists after hearing them speaking at their pitch at a sort of speakers corner in Leytonstone. Before the war such areas of oration were not uncommon in different parts of the country. My dad said the communists encouraged young people to get up on a soapbox and have a go at public speaking. He was a founding member of the Young Communist League.
The  Leytonstone Trades Council premises in common with many at the time was not only a place where trade union branches met and leftwing meetings took place,  there were also education classes by The Central Labour College and a Woman’s Guild choir and a children’s brass band organised by the local cobbler who my father worked for before he left school.

As a member of workers delegations he visited : the Soviet Union, Spain during the civil war where he met members of the Durutti Column and China. He told me one of the cockney delegates while in China asked the Chinese Maoists “What do you do with those Capitalist Roaders? Do you cut their ruddy heads off? ” The Chinese diplomatically smiled.

One of his best friends Tom Vetterlein who was Area Organiser for the ETU in East London informed King Street aka the HQ of the party, that the union leadership election was being fiddled – only to be nastily smeared because the leadership were in some way complicit. Needless to say my dad never forgave them.

Most of his life he worked for what became the London Co-operative Society and was elected onto its management committee from 1937 to 1964 he always topped the poll because of the support of his fellow workers. At first there were three communists Sybil White and Eleanor the wife of leading communist intellectual Emil Burns.
They later formed the 1960 committee, an alliance with broad left co-operators, including Stan Newens (later MP for Harlow), and they together won control of the management committee. Harry went to Sweden and encouraged the co-op to introduce supermarkets with checkouts that he had seen there. He was elected president from 1964 till 1971 after defeating the notorious John Stonehouse.