My father, Tom McIlravey, who has died aged 93, was a factory worker and long-time communist until, in his 70s, he surprised his friends by joining the Labour party to fight Blairism from within.
Tom was born in Greenock, Clydeside. His father, also called Tom, who was a riveter in the shipyards, and mother, Flora (nee MacDonald), led an impoverished life. Although a bright child, he left school at 14 to help support his parents and four siblings, who lived in a two-room tenement with no bathroom and not enough food to go round.
Appalling working conditions in the shipyards and frequent industrial accidents led Tom to develop a lifelong commitment to the trade union movement and to join the Communist party of Great Britain.
During the second world war, shipbuilding was a reserved occupation, but when it was over he responded to a newspaper advert and went to work in Prague, helping in the rebuilding of Czechoslovakia.
In 1946, with other members of his family, he moved to Luton, working in a bearings factory, and joined the Amalgamated Engineering Union. He remained on the production line of the same factory for nearly 30 years before being made redundant. No other local factory would employ him. Decades later, he discovered via an acquaintance who worked in human resources for another employer that he had been “red-listed”.
With few employment prospects, he left his family in the early 1980s to take an access course at Ruskin College, Oxford, and, by now in his 60s, gained a politics degree from the University of Sheffield. After graduating he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and for Nelson Mandela’s release, and volunteered to help adults with poor literacy.
While acknowledging its faults, he maintained faith in communism until 1989, when the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown and shocking images of disabled children chained in orphanages were released.
At this point, by now in his 70s, he decided to join the Labour party, earnestly believing the Blairite project must be challenged. As with everything he did, he brought passion and energy to Labour and canvassed in all weathers into his early 90s. To the surprise of some friends allied to old Labour, he was a passionate supporter of remaining in the EU to protect UK workers’ rights.
Tom credited his energy to his love of learning, travelling and trying new things. A multilinguist, he learned German from prisoners of war in Scotland, and Czech when he was in Prague after the war, and taught himself Russian with the help of Russian sailors. He went to Madeira in his 80s and decided to learn some Portuguese to be polite. “If I can just learn 200 or so words, that should be OK,” he told us.
He is survived by his wife, Ena (nee Phillips), whom he married in 1965, two sons, Ian and me, and a granddaughter, Decca.
