Bill Hunter 1920-2015

Submitted by AWL on 28 July, 2015 - 5:12 Author: Sean Matgamna

Bill Hunter died on 9 July. He was a leading member of the early British Trotskyist group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, later a member of the organisations led by Gerry Healy, but joining the faction which opposed and split from Healy in the 1980s. Sean Matgamna remembers Bill Hunter.


Insofar as it is possible to separate personal qualities from politics, Bill Hunter was a model revolutionary: selfless, dedicated, always striving to be “objective” — that is, not to let personal feelings intrude on political attitudes and decisions — willing to  pay whatever personal price his politics demanded of him.

When I first encountered him, early in 1960, I thought he looked the part, with a long ascetic face (after a near-fatal car crash in 1962, his face had to be reconstructed), spare frame and his general air of driving political seriousness. Without these qualities no revolutionary movement is possible. They are not enough, of course. Bill’s political life was a tragic proof of that.

I have a fond memory of Bill from the early 60s. I came upon him in Manchester waiting in the little van he drove — he was Lancashire-Cheshire organiser for the Socialist Labour League — deeply engrossed in The ABC of Communism, the early 1920s book by  Bukharin and Preobrazhensky.  It was perhaps the sixth time he’d read it, he told me; he reread “the books” of the movement frequently.

He’d been a Trotskyist then for at least 20 years.  The title he put on his autobiography, Lifelong Apprentice summed up his attitude. It was the right attitude.

• The next issue of Solidarity will carry a longer obituary.

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