obituaries of two brilliant uk radicals (part one)
info-shifter | 26.01.2002 17:54
in the last two days two brialliant but different radicals have died, in our post modern times when history is unimportant it is incumbent on us, from whatever strain of the movement to remember our own. recently, one of the main people behind freedom the long running anarchist newspaper died and the wasnt an obituary on indymedia.this should not happen again..
benny rothman was a long time communist, trade unionist and pioneer open access activist who led a famous mass trespass in the thirties to kinder scout pass in derbyshire, an action which helped lead to the creation of the national parks.we may not see his like again....
from the Guardian
Benny Rothman
Inspirational figure who led the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass in its fight for open access
its a lovely obituary
Jim Perrin
Guardian
Friday January 25, 2002
The most important event in the movement for access to open country in Britain was the 1932 Kinder Scout Mass Trespass. Its prime mover was a 20-year-old Manchester communist in the motor trade - Jewish by descent, tiny in stature and fiery in rhetoric. Benny Rothman, who has died aged 90, is now revered as the patron saint of the British outdoor community.
Rothman was the middle of five children of Romanian-Jewish parents who had come to Britain at the turn of the century. His father ran hardware stalls at Glossop and Shaw markets. The family were very poor, so that, although Benny won a scholarship to Manchester's Central High school for boys, he had to leave at 14 when an errand boy's job came up. At least he then had funds for the two commitments of his life: the outdoors and political agitation.
In the summer of 1925, he left the back streets of Manchester, cycled to north Wales and climbed Snowdon with a sixpenny map from Woolworths: "I was the only person up there. It just hit me, that great open view with the sea all around."
In 1928, he was working as a motor trade apprentice in Deansgate, Manchester, when Bill Donne, a Scots mechanic, invited him along to the economic debates held on Sunday nights in the Clarion Cafe on Manchester's Market Street - rousing occasions when Trotskyists, Independent Labour Party members, socialists and communists would harangue each other under vivid, stylised murals by left-wing painters.
That year, Rothman joined the Young Communist League. In the interwar years the YCL and its associated body, the British Workers' Sports Federation (BWSF), organised Derbyshire weekend camps. Run on a shoestring, using army surplus equipment from the first world war, they sucked in Manchester's poor and unemployed. It was around the camp firesides that realisation dawned about the process of theft which had put Derbyshire's moors into private hands.
The Mass Trespass grew out of one incident: some of the London section of the BWSF were at a camp at Rowarth and went for a ramble on Bleaklow. At Yellowslacks Brook, the group, led by Rothman, were threatened by a group of keepers. "It was not at all unusual for ramblers to get very, very badly beaten by them," Rothman remembered, "and of course, if you were working-class there was no redress. Back at the camp we decided that if, instead of six or seven, there'd been 40 or 50 of us, they wouldn't have been able to do it."
The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass took place shortly afterwards, on April 24 1932, following a rally at the quarry on Kinder Road, Hayfield, where it is now commemorated by a plaque. The intended speaker took fright at the sight of a police presence of 200 men, and Rothman took his place. He castigated the organised rambling movement for inactivity, insisting that if concessions were to be won, they must be fought for. Five hundred people marched on Kinder Scout - the highest hill in the Peak District, across which there was then no public right of way.
After a drunken keeper sprained an ankle while assaulting a rambler, the event became one of riotous assembly, and five participants, including Rothman, were brought to trial. Witnesses from the police and the water board - which owned some of Kinder and leased it for shooting - lined up to perjure themselves.
The judge subtly drew attention in his summing-up to the fact that three of the defendants were obviously Jewish, and Rothman received a four-month prison sentence. Even this newspaper's great radical predecessor, the Manchester Guardian, adopted a sniffily schoolboy tone about the event: "Trespassing is best done alone, or with one or two at the most companions. When you do it with a crowd all the fun goes out of it."
After coming out of Leicester jail, Rothman moved to Burnley to help workers organise at the time of the Moor Loom strike, the north-east Lancashire textile dispute. After a year, it was defeated and thousands thrown out of work. He returned to Manchester and mended market traders' vans at Syd Abram's garage in Cheetham. He was still active in the outdoors, and campaigned against the government's 1933 bill to outlaw camping on any but official sites, but another, more serious fight was brewing.
At that time, Manchester, with its large Jewish community, was a focus for Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, who set up clubs which offered cheap beer and anti-semitism. When Mosley held a rally at Belle Vue, Rothman, along with Eveline Taylor, who later married Jack Jones, went to protest, and they were violently manhandled out of the hall.
Towards the end of the decade, Rothman found work at AV Roe's aircraft factory, where he was victimised for his political beliefs, and then at Metropolitan Vickers in Trafford Park, reputedly the most highly organised factory in Britain - and the most enlightened towards its workers. He volunteered as an ambulance driver for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, but was rejected for the army in 1939 as being in a reserved occupation. After the second world war, he worked indefatigably in the trade union movement.
In 1979, his sense of achievement was shattered by Mrs Thatcher's policy on the environment and access to it. He campaigned against the Tory countryside legislation with an energy which astonished many who were 40 or 50 years his junior. On the 50th anniversary of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, he published a terse and resonant account of the event. He cultivated an extraordinary range of allies in various causes, and became himself a central attraction at frequent rallies, where gifts undiminished over 50 years as a speaker were displayed to a new generation of lovers of the outdoors.
His importance, particularly in winning concessions at various stages of the water privatisation bill, cannot be overstressed. He made frequent appearances on radio and television. But his imagination wasn't just engaged by injustice to users of the outdoors. He would campaign as readily for a local group of pensioners as he would from a national platform.
Rothman was well under five feet tall, a strong man, calm-eyed, watchful and humorous, with a passionate and selfless conviction. Latterly he lived in the Manchester suburb of Timperley, tended his allotment and continued to ramble on the moors.
His wife Lilian pre- deceased him. He is survived by his daughter and his son.
· Bernard (Benny) Rothman, activist, climber and rambler, born June 1 1911; died January 23 2002.
benny rothman was a long time communist, trade unionist and pioneer open access activist who led a famous mass trespass in the thirties to kinder scout pass in derbyshire, an action which helped lead to the creation of the national parks.we may not see his like again....
from the Guardian
Benny Rothman
Inspirational figure who led the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass in its fight for open access
its a lovely obituary
Jim Perrin
Guardian
Friday January 25, 2002
The most important event in the movement for access to open country in Britain was the 1932 Kinder Scout Mass Trespass. Its prime mover was a 20-year-old Manchester communist in the motor trade - Jewish by descent, tiny in stature and fiery in rhetoric. Benny Rothman, who has died aged 90, is now revered as the patron saint of the British outdoor community.
Rothman was the middle of five children of Romanian-Jewish parents who had come to Britain at the turn of the century. His father ran hardware stalls at Glossop and Shaw markets. The family were very poor, so that, although Benny won a scholarship to Manchester's Central High school for boys, he had to leave at 14 when an errand boy's job came up. At least he then had funds for the two commitments of his life: the outdoors and political agitation.
In the summer of 1925, he left the back streets of Manchester, cycled to north Wales and climbed Snowdon with a sixpenny map from Woolworths: "I was the only person up there. It just hit me, that great open view with the sea all around."
In 1928, he was working as a motor trade apprentice in Deansgate, Manchester, when Bill Donne, a Scots mechanic, invited him along to the economic debates held on Sunday nights in the Clarion Cafe on Manchester's Market Street - rousing occasions when Trotskyists, Independent Labour Party members, socialists and communists would harangue each other under vivid, stylised murals by left-wing painters.
That year, Rothman joined the Young Communist League. In the interwar years the YCL and its associated body, the British Workers' Sports Federation (BWSF), organised Derbyshire weekend camps. Run on a shoestring, using army surplus equipment from the first world war, they sucked in Manchester's poor and unemployed. It was around the camp firesides that realisation dawned about the process of theft which had put Derbyshire's moors into private hands.
The Mass Trespass grew out of one incident: some of the London section of the BWSF were at a camp at Rowarth and went for a ramble on Bleaklow. At Yellowslacks Brook, the group, led by Rothman, were threatened by a group of keepers. "It was not at all unusual for ramblers to get very, very badly beaten by them," Rothman remembered, "and of course, if you were working-class there was no redress. Back at the camp we decided that if, instead of six or seven, there'd been 40 or 50 of us, they wouldn't have been able to do it."
The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass took place shortly afterwards, on April 24 1932, following a rally at the quarry on Kinder Road, Hayfield, where it is now commemorated by a plaque. The intended speaker took fright at the sight of a police presence of 200 men, and Rothman took his place. He castigated the organised rambling movement for inactivity, insisting that if concessions were to be won, they must be fought for. Five hundred people marched on Kinder Scout - the highest hill in the Peak District, across which there was then no public right of way.
After a drunken keeper sprained an ankle while assaulting a rambler, the event became one of riotous assembly, and five participants, including Rothman, were brought to trial. Witnesses from the police and the water board - which owned some of Kinder and leased it for shooting - lined up to perjure themselves.
The judge subtly drew attention in his summing-up to the fact that three of the defendants were obviously Jewish, and Rothman received a four-month prison sentence. Even this newspaper's great radical predecessor, the Manchester Guardian, adopted a sniffily schoolboy tone about the event: "Trespassing is best done alone, or with one or two at the most companions. When you do it with a crowd all the fun goes out of it."
After coming out of Leicester jail, Rothman moved to Burnley to help workers organise at the time of the Moor Loom strike, the north-east Lancashire textile dispute. After a year, it was defeated and thousands thrown out of work. He returned to Manchester and mended market traders' vans at Syd Abram's garage in Cheetham. He was still active in the outdoors, and campaigned against the government's 1933 bill to outlaw camping on any but official sites, but another, more serious fight was brewing.
At that time, Manchester, with its large Jewish community, was a focus for Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, who set up clubs which offered cheap beer and anti-semitism. When Mosley held a rally at Belle Vue, Rothman, along with Eveline Taylor, who later married Jack Jones, went to protest, and they were violently manhandled out of the hall.
Towards the end of the decade, Rothman found work at AV Roe's aircraft factory, where he was victimised for his political beliefs, and then at Metropolitan Vickers in Trafford Park, reputedly the most highly organised factory in Britain - and the most enlightened towards its workers. He volunteered as an ambulance driver for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, but was rejected for the army in 1939 as being in a reserved occupation. After the second world war, he worked indefatigably in the trade union movement.
In 1979, his sense of achievement was shattered by Mrs Thatcher's policy on the environment and access to it. He campaigned against the Tory countryside legislation with an energy which astonished many who were 40 or 50 years his junior. On the 50th anniversary of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, he published a terse and resonant account of the event. He cultivated an extraordinary range of allies in various causes, and became himself a central attraction at frequent rallies, where gifts undiminished over 50 years as a speaker were displayed to a new generation of lovers of the outdoors.
His importance, particularly in winning concessions at various stages of the water privatisation bill, cannot be overstressed. He made frequent appearances on radio and television. But his imagination wasn't just engaged by injustice to users of the outdoors. He would campaign as readily for a local group of pensioners as he would from a national platform.
Rothman was well under five feet tall, a strong man, calm-eyed, watchful and humorous, with a passionate and selfless conviction. Latterly he lived in the Manchester suburb of Timperley, tended his allotment and continued to ramble on the moors.
His wife Lilian pre- deceased him. He is survived by his daughter and his son.
· Bernard (Benny) Rothman, activist, climber and rambler, born June 1 1911; died January 23 2002.
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