Chapter 11

Women and the Lost World of Scottish Communism
Neil Rafeek’s Communist Women in Scotland1

A decade ago Steven Fielding concluded a highly critical review of Noreen Branson’s History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1941–1951 (1997)—the fourth volume of the party’s “official” history—by asking: “how much attention does an organisation whose official membership never exceeded 56,000 actually merit?” Fielding then went on to accuse the book of unwarranted “self-importance,” given that it was dealing with a party that, even at its most successful, “remained a marginal force,” and recommended a posture of “humility”; after all, he asked, “how different would Britain have been without the CPGB?”2 For most of its existence, including the period when it was a genuinely revolutionary organization, the CPGB had considerably fewer members than the 56,000 it achieved during the Second World War: 4,000 at the beginning in 1920, 4,742 at the end in 1991.3 The numbers do not tell the whole story and to suggest that it would have made no or little difference whether or not the CPGB had existed suggests, at the very least, rather limited knowledge of the British labor movement. For better or worse, sometimes for better and worse, the CPGB was never irrelevant.

For this reason alone, the late Neil Rafeek’s posthumously published book, Communist Women in Scotland, is of considerable interest to anyone concerned with attempts to build left-wing organizations outside the Labour Party. Based on his PhD thesis, the first to be awarded for oral history at the University of Strathclyde, Rafeek’s book is constructed around interviews with forty-one, mainly female, former members of the CPGB in Scotland conducted between 1994 and 1999.4 The resulting work covers the entire period from the party’s formation in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution to its final self-immolation in 1992, following the collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The main chronological focus is, however, on the period following the Second World War, an emphasis no doubt partly determined by the availability of surviving interviewees, but also the result of a conscious choice by Rafeek, who saw this period in the party’s history as having been “undervalued,” a judgment that he hoped to overturn on the basis of material “which reveals, in Scotland at least, the extent to which the party was still active and in some areas very relevant.”5 Rafeek’s point is valid, since this foreshortening of the CPGB’s period of influence continues unabated. In his recent biography of Hamish Henderson, for example, Timothy Neat writes of how in 1959 his hero was “delighted to be invited to become a member of the Fife Socialist League,” while the CPGB, to which he had hitherto belonged, “floundered into obscurity.”6 At the very least judgments of this sort read back later developments onto a period to which they are inapplicable. Nevertheless, a proper acknowledgment that the CPGB continued to be an important component of socialist politics in Scotland well into the postwar period does not mean this period was when the organization exercised its greatest positive influence. As we shall see, Rafeek’s essentially uncritical attitude to orthodox Communism and his acceptance of its own self-image means that he has no sense that the CPGB might have become a different kind of party in 1951 than it was in 1921. I will return to these issues below, but it is important to state first that, whatever criticisms may be leveled at it, the book is important for two reasons.

First, as I have already suggested, Rafeek reminds us of how important the CPGB was as part of the labor movement, not only nor even mainly in great set-piece trade union struggles, but in myriad small-scale types of local activity in which the “Communist women” that form his subject were more likely to participate. One episode in which female party activists played a major role, for example, was in campaigning for better screening procedures for cervical cancer in the 1950s and 1960s—the type of unglamorous but essential activity that extended welfare provision from below, but that would not have been as effective without the involvement of politically conscious activists that the CPGB supplied in numbers quite disproportionate to the size of the organization.7 Rafeek is therefore correct to rhetorically inquire: “Had the CP not existed one might wonder how many reforms attributed to action by the labour movement would have been achieved.”8 What he also brings out strongly in relation to this kind of activity is the way in which members of the CPGB were embedded in their local communities, at least until the 1960s. This is one reason why the influence of the CPGB in Scotland went far beyond those who agreed with all its politics. William McIlvanney, for example, testified to this when he wrote, in the year of the organization’s demise, that “Scottish Communism has remained its own animal, less bear than beast of social burden, helping hurt lives in the small ways that it could, given its continuously enfeebled state.” And, in relation to its members, McIlvanney spoke for many others in saying: “Disagreeing with their theory, I have found myself time and time again replenished by their practice and renewed in my belief in a more habitable vision of the future.”9

Second, the book also provides a permanent testament to several generations of mainly working-class female activists whose recollections of their political experience would otherwise have remained unheard by anyone outside their immediate circles. What is immediately striking, from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, is how some forms of socialist activity remain essentially the same today, even with the advance of electronic communication.10 Take, for example, the eternal staple activity of every revolutionary: Selling the Paper. Mary Docherty recalls how “we used to go canvassing for the Daily Worker nearly every Saturday or we organized areas to sell the Daily Worker and we had members of the party that went out on a regular Saturday round with extra papers on a Saturday.”11 A similar approach, prioritizing personal rather than public sales, was taken with publications specifically produced for women: “You went from door to door, it’s a lot simpler in a small village going from door to door; you know people physically, it’s not as hard as in the city running up and down tenements, and you go down a street in no time, unless you blethered of course, which happened pretty often, and we used to sell about 100 Women Today for instance, which was the party publication at the time.”12 Beyond any particular forms of activity, the sense of “the party” as a self-contained “virtual” community in its own right, emphasized by many of those interviewed here, is one that even today members of any organization to the left of the Labour Party will recognize. There is continuity then; but what has changed is equally striking. The cultural context in which many of Rafeek’s interviewees became involved in politics—those belonging to the earliest generations in particular—has completely disappeared. The world in which Socialist Sunday Schools, the Clarion Scouts, or the Woodcraft Folk were mass working-class organizations, and formed a common background not only for members of the groups that initially formed the CPGB but also for the Independent Labour Party (ILP), now seem almost unimaginably distant.13 Yet despite the book’s undoubted usefulness as a documentary record, the fundamental organizing concepts around which Rafeek structured his book—the distinctiveness of being Scottish, the specific experience of women, and the politics of Communism—all reveal problems with his approach.

Rafeek criticizes Pamela Graves for ignoring what is specific to Scotland in a book (Labour Women) supposedly dedicated to the British experience as a whole. It is not clear to me, however, that his book engages with this subnational dimension either, other than by setting geographical limits to his interview base.14 Interesting aspects of this theme emerge from the testimony of his interviewees but are largely left unexplored. One of these concerns the level of regional unevenness within Scotland, particularly in cultural terms. It is clear from comments by Aberdonian members of the party that they regarded their Glaswegian comrades as expressing attitudes that the former found overbearing and arrogant. The Aberdonians go on to explain these contrasts, in admirably materialist terms, as arising from the fact that the working class was longer established, more highly industrialized, and more confident of its organizational strength in the Southwest than the Northeast, where workers were still often second- or even first-generation migrants from the countryside.15

More significant perhaps, but completely untouched by Rafeek, is the tension between the Scots as a whole and the English. Yet this was an issue, as the Scottish writer Jackie Kay recalls in another collection based on the experiences of the generations brought up in Communist families: “Scottish Communists didn’t identify with England: even with English party members, they would be criticised for thinking London was the centre of the universe. The London party was thought to be very chauvinistic.”16 What is more puzzling is the absence of any discussion of the party’s attitude to what has successively been described as “home rule,” “self-government,” and “devolution,” even though the CPGB supported the establishment of a Scottish Parliament from the turn of the century to the Popular Front in the mid-thirties onward.17 It could be argued that this has nothing particularly to do with the Communist women who are his main subject; but Rafeek devotes a chapter to Communist attitudes toward the Soviet Union and its satellites, and there is nothing gender-specific about that subject either. In particular, devolution became a central demand after the work-in at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1971–72, an episode to which Rafeek rightly devotes several pages of discussion but says nothing on this aspect.18

This omission may be because the subject raises several difficult questions concerning Communist policy. One long-standing criticism of the CPGB (to which the present author subscribes) is that it consistently embraced what might be called “lower-case” Scottish nationalism to the detriment of the labor movement, in two respects. One was to give priority to a Popular Front politics of pan-national “class alliances” over strike action whenever faced with any major industrial crisis, such as a plant closure. The other was that, even in situations where industrial action proved unavoidable, the arguments against closures or job losses tended to be framed in terms of the defense of “Scotland’s industries” or “Scotland’s jobs.”19 The disastrous consequences of this were most starkly apparent during the Miners’ Strike of 1984–85, a dispute that Rafeek rightly sees as crucial in setting the context for subsequent working-class politics. “Unfortunately for the mining communities and labour movement, the dispute ended in defeat for the strike and wholesale rundown of the mining industry.”20 All true, but one of the reasons for the defeat was that, at a crucial point in the dispute, when the case was made by striking miners for mass picketing to close down Ravenscraig Steelworks, members of the CPGB with positions in both the National Union of Mineworkers and the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation opposed the strategy on the grounds that this might cause long-term damage to “Scotland’s steel industry,” when it should have been obvious that if the miners did not win, the steel industry would follow the coal industry into oblivion—which is of course what happened within a decade.

Insofar as a distinctive aspect to CPGB politics in Scotland emerges from these interviews, it is that the Scots were generally more accepting of the leadership positions. Susan Galloway, a member of the Young Communist League from Manchester, described the political divisions within the CPGB in England from the 1970s as essentially falling along class lines, with the Eurocommunists being “professional, middle class, academic” and the “Marxist-Leninists” with whom she aligned herself being “trade union communists and the working class.” In Scotland, however, where the class composition of the party was far more weighted toward the working class, there was still support for the Eurocommunist-dominated Executive Committee, but for different reasons: “You had the phenomena of the party loyalists, large sections of the party who were working class and they just didn’t accept the political developments there had been in the party and they saw it was important to be loyal to the executive committee and that was their view and for a long, long time, even when there was expulsions and everything, they stuck to that position.”21 This account is not particularly flattering to the CPGB in Scotland, particularly when we learn, from Rafeek himself, that Scotland “was a party district whose delegates at congresses customarily supported the party executive, usually unanimously, and were placed where all delegates could see them.”22 Tom Nairn once wrote: “Just as there was no Old Tory like a Scotch Old Tory, so there would be no Gladstonian Liberal like a Scotch one, no Imperialist like the North British variety, and no Labourite like the Glasgow Faithfuls.”23 It would appear that there was no Stalinist like a Scottish Stalinist either—although, as we shall see, Rafeek refuses the term.

To what extent then was the fact of gendered difference significant to female members of the CPGB, at least insofar as they saw themselves as Communists? In other words, is the entire category of “Communist women” misleading? Rafeek himself writes: “I need to emphasise that the women I interviewed did not see gender and the role of women as a reason to join the CP. . . . Their primary aim was to fight for socialism. Although some might have felt gender constraints, they were really interested in a collective approach to the class struggle and building the CP into the vanguard party in Britain.”24 Rafeek sees the lack of direct engagement with what was known as “the women question” as largely positive, although occasionally his comments reveal some of the underlying tensions: “Although some [women] may have been disappointed by the inflexibility in family difficulties and women’s domestic responsibility, this era also reflects the united stand behind party policy and the common goal of socialism that came before all else.”25 What did “family difficulties” and “domestic responsibility” involve? On the basis of his own evidence, it was that women generally had to carry out their social roles as wives, mothers, and carers in addition to party activity, but that even the latter tended to involve the necessary but less political aspects of Communist life—quite literally making tea and sandwiches in some cases. As Rafeek puts it with rather excessive restraint: “Although fund raising was hugely important for the party, there seemed to be an over reliance on women members to do the most mundane and, as far as political results were concerned, less rewarding tasks.”26 Only those women who were unmarried escaped the double burden. Mary Park, for example, is quoted as saying:

I never saw any reason to become involved in women’s politics; to me it was the political situation and what needed to be done and how we could advance to a better socialist system of society. . . . I probably should have been more involved in the women’s side of things, but I just accepted that I was an equal part of the organization and at that time I didn’t have children and I wasn’t tied down, I was free to do whatever I wanted to do. . . . 27

Rafeek notes that women did not suddenly become aware of their oppression in the 1960s, with the advent of the modern women’s liberation movement; they were aware, but that awareness was subordinated to the need for socialism. “From the developing feminist viewpoint, the argument 15 years later was the other way round: there could be no change towards socialism until all communists recognised the need to end discrimination in the party.”28 Two points need to be made here. First, if the following comments made by Katy Campbell are more generally applicable, then the women-only debates opened up under the impact of the women’s movement of the 1970s were a genuinely liberating experience for women members; this in turn suggests that they had been less satisfied with their situation than Rafeek claims. Campbell recalls that “everybody spoke but everybody, I mean people you never heard open their mouths at party meetings. So interesting and so much of it reflective, I mean years of reflection coming out about life in general in the world that the party men would never hear.”29

Second, while it is certainly the case that the issue of sexual inequality within the party became a live issue at this time, the dividing line politically went deeper than this. By the early 1980s, the key argument, advocated by Beatrice Campbell among others, was that the achievement of socialism would not in itself liberate women and that, along with the end of racism and other forms of oppression, it had to be fought for as a separate if related goal. As with the national question, the key issue here is political: how was it that, once the question of women’s liberation was no longer possible to avoid, the alternative to treating it as a second-order “after socialism” issue was the adoption of essentially bourgeois feminist positions.

This takes us, finally, to the core politics of the CPGB, the subject upon which Rafeek maintains his deepest silence. This is not a Scottish, or British, issue. The inescapable context for any discussion of the CPGB, the factor without which there would have been no Communist Party in Great Britain or anywhere else, is the Russian Revolution and the destiny of the state that emerged out of it. The CPGB perished in the same year as the Soviet Union, and this, to use an expression well known to readers of the party’s literature, Is No Accident. At this point anyone reviewing a book about the CPGB (or any other Communist party) has to declare their position. Put bluntly, the attitude one takes to the overall politics of the CPGB as an organization will depend on the attitude one takes to the Soviet Union and the Communist International. In particular, it depends on whether one believes that during the 1920s these institutions either preserved or reversed the achievements of 1917, whether they maintained or abandoned Leninist politics. My own position is that by 1928 at the latest, the Stalinist bureaucracy had effectively led a counter-revolution that in terms of content had destroyed every element of socialism in the Soviet Union while retaining continuity with 1917 only in terms of the outward forms of observance. Connoisseurs of the British left will recognize in this the position associated with the International Socialist tradition. Early on in his book Rafeek makes clear that he has no time for Trotskyist criticisms of any sort, however unorthodox, as can be seen from his comment on the histories of the CPGB by Bronstein and Richardson, Dewar, Woodhouse and Pearce, and other Trotskyists: “These histories justify the Trotskyite line yet fail to acknowledge the CPGB’s achievements, most notably why it still managed to attract politically conscious workers in noticeable numbers compared with the comparative (even absolute) failure of other left-wing parties that espoused revolutionary politics.”30 Rafeek then goes on to quote Kevin Morgan on the motivations behind membership of the CPGB and the complexity of the allegiances that it involved—issues about which Trotskyists were allegedly either ignorant or uninterested.31

This is a caricature, of course. A common position among most Trotskyists of whatever variety is that the formation of the CPGB was a major step forward for the revolutionary left in Britain, overcoming the fragmentation that had formerly existed among groups like the British Socialist Party and the Socialist Labour Party, as well as the combination of sectarian and propagandist tactics that characterized their politics. But even in relation to the period after the CPGB ceased to be a revolutionary organization, it should be clear from this review that I recognize and respect the commitment and activism of the membership; no one joined the CPGB for a quiet life or a position of bureaucratic security, when they could instead realistically expect to be jailed, blacklisted, witch-hunted, or subject to the attention of the security services.32 The point is not the personal integrity of the members but the political degeneration of their organization—unavoidable when the ideal of socialist society it upheld was in reality a murderous bureaucratic dictatorship based on systematic repression of the working class, slave labor, and national oppression of minority peoples.

Much recent writing on the CPGB by sympathetic academics, a body of work to which Rafeek’s book belongs, has claimed on the one hand that the CPGB reflected native British socialist traditions and on the other that it operated more independently of Moscow than is usually thought. Rafeek, for example, refers to membership disagreement with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 as an importance example of dissidence before the greater upheavals caused by Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution.33 The first claim can be sustained, although, mutatis mutandis, it could be made of all the Communist parties. It was not, however, unequivocally positive since the emphasis on national traditions all too often collapsed into a form of left nationalism (discussed above in relation to Scotland) that was actively encouraged by the Communist International following the turn to the Popular Front in 1935. Neither does it necessarily support the claims for independence from Moscow, which are unsustainable, at least before the late 1960s by which point the leadership of the CPSU no longer required the unquestioning obedience of its “sister” parties. Individual members had always had personal sticking points when some new outrage, often involving Russian foreign policy, brought an accumulation of discontents to a head and made continued membership impossible. These occurred both before and after 1956 and in Scotland involved figures as important as Harry McShane, but the leadership of the party and the bulk of the membership accepted them. Formed in the context of the Russian Revolution, shaped by the shifting balance of power with the Russian party and state, the CPGB could not have escaped the degeneration that befell them during the 1920s without breaking with Stalinism. This interpretation of the fate of the Communist parties is not, incidentally, exclusive to Trotskyism, but one that was shared by many other socialists who remained unconvinced by the Stalinist myth. In the late 1930s, Franz Borkenau, a member of the Communist Party of Germany between 1921 and 1929, wrote an important history of the Communist International, from an essentially social democratic viewpoint, in which he identified three periods in its development: the first (1919–1923) in which it was a genuine revolutionary organization; the second (1923–1928) by which time it had become an extension of the faction struggle within the CPSU; and a third (1928–1943) by which time it had been turned into a component of Russian foreign policy.34

How did the interests of Russian foreign policy affect CPGB activity? Rafeek mentions detailed critical discussions of CPGB’s industrial policy during the Second World War, which was to support the British and, by extension, the Russian war effort, but fails to say what the nature of that criticism is, let alone attempt to answer it. There were, for example, two important wartime strikes in Glasgow about equal pay for women engineers, one at Rolls Royce at Hillingdon and the other at Barr and Stroud at Anniesland. In relation to the first, Rafeek recounts the experience of Agnes MacLean, a leading figure in the action: “Despite recent attempts to paint a more cynical and derogatory view of the CP in Scotland during the war, Agnes McLean had no doubts about why she came to join it.” Rafeek quotes McLean: “I found that the people who were ready to support the women and back them and stand by them and never let them down were Communist Party members.” Rafeek adds: “It was during the industrial action that Agnes and her colleagues received full support from communists.”35

Things were, however, more rather more complex than this picture of unambiguous backing suggests. In an article that Rafeek dismisses without actually discussing, the late Peter Bain notes the overall context of CP policy:

The CP had resolutely opposed strikes since the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and with a claimed membership of 600–700 in the Scottish Rolls-Royce factories, Party members filled many leading union positions and controlled Hillington’s negotiating committee. Thus, no doubt sincere support for improving women’s wages was constrained by an overriding commitment to attain advances without recourse to strikes. Whilst this was the “Party line” inevitably this led to internal tensions. For example, Hillington convenor Andrew McElroy was reported to have resigned from the CP after the defeat of his motion to financially support the C2 block strikers in August. . . . During the strike a CP leaflet called for a return to work on the basis of the steward’s proposals and the AEU call to speed up the negotiating machinery.36

A similar contradictory position, which ultimately emphasized the need to curtail the action before all the women’s demands were met, characterized the Anniesland strike: “The Communist Party also leafleted the Anniesland plant to urge an immediate end to the strike, and it was a CP member who moved the return to work. The Daily Worker first mentioned the dispute on December 29th (the strike started on December 11th), and devoted a total of only around 300 words in three brief factual reports during the month the women were on strike.”37 The differences of interpretation over this episode suggest one of the inherent dangers of oral history, which Rafeek does not always overcome. The necessary desire to allow the speaker to register his or her memory of events without prompting by the historian can lead, where the memories are not at least compared with other accounts that might contradict them, to an unreflective acceptance of their testimony as the truth: did the CP argument for going back to work constitute “full support”? It clearly did not for everyone involved in the Hillington strike. The fact that Rafeek was predisposed to uncritically accept Agnes MacLean’s version means that he does not inquire whether it was (for example) retrospectively informed by her subsequent lifelong membership of the Communist Party and a valedictory desire to emphasize the positive role it played in the labor movement.

Throughout, Rafeek is hostile to other left parties and groups outside the Labour Party, and although he does not quote his interviewees on the subject, there is no reason to suspect that the majority would disagree with his views. There were certainly was no credible alternatives to the CPGB until very late in the period covered by his book. As Rafeek writes: “After the war CP members were able to look at various ultra-left groups that seemed eternally anti-Soviet and whose undistinguished impact suggested the CP must be doing something right, for it remained the largest party to the left of the Labour Party.”38 And even after 1956, which saw the first major wave of resignations from the party, rival left groups did not immediately gain memberships beyond the hundreds at best and tens in the case of most. Rafeek notes of the failure of the Fife Socialist League, the one wholly Scottish New Left organization, to establish itself on a permanent basis: “There was no room in British politics for an organised political alternative to fit between the Labour Party’s social democracy and the CP’s radical Marxism.”39 But this is precisely the point. Particularly after 1968, the idea that the CPGB represented “radical Marxism” was increasingly regarded as a joke outside its own ranks, except among employees of MI5 or leader columnists for the Scottish Daily Express. Members of the CPGB were of course still to the left of mainstream Labour politics. A revealing episode is recalled by Alice Milne in which the sainted Donald Dewar, lobbied by members of the Aberdeen Peace Committee about the Vietnam War, is as evasive and patronizing toward them as he is deferential and exculpatory toward the United States.40 But although the CPGB and the Labour Party stood on opposite sides of the Cold War, in terms of domestic politics, the former was much closer to the latter than it was to, say, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), which was dominated by the despised “ultra-left,” and it was the groups inside VSC that were attracting the young.

Rafeek tacitly recognizes the way in which the focus for left activity began to slip away from the CPGB, but only in relation to the great industrial struggles of the early 1970s: “The denouement for the establishment must have been a fear of union militancy seeping through to young minds, which it did to the extent that even the CP was seen as slightly old hat.”41 In a collection of interviews with mainly Scottish women conducted in the mid-1970s, Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham found that those born during the Second World War, and for whom the Labour Party was intolerable, now had a range of organizational alternatives beyond the CPGB, either in Trotskyist groups like the International Socialists or in broader campaigns like those of the women’s liberation movement.42 In effect, these took over the type of activity that used to be dominated by the CPGB, as was recognized by many former members who gravitated to their campaigns. But for many older former members no party could take the place of the CPGB. Jean McCrindle herself expresses the views of that generation in an interview with Rafeek: “The party was our life, it really was. I’ve never experienced politics again like that except in the women’s movement actually, when it becomes your life again. But as a political party I’ve never had that again.”43

But it is also important to realize that this was not true of everyone with this history. In his autobiographical account of the campaign against the poll tax during the late 1980s, Tommy Sheridan recalls that some of the people who took part had been involved in Communist politics:

Jack Jardine raved about these meetings. He said it reminded him of his childhood in Govan. A communist called Peter McIntyre held big meetings from the fountain of the cross. . . . Jack himself was a leader of the apprentices’ strike which began on Clydeside in 1952 when he was seventeen. . . . The Young Communist League leafleted for the strike and one of its members, Jimmy Reid, was a spokesman on the committee. . . . One of the first people elected on our committee was Meg Callaghan . . . a Rolls Royce widow. As it turned out, she had been brought up in the ILP. She remembers marching beside Manny Shinwell and Jimmy Maxton as a child. Her parents sent her to Socialist Sunday School. . . . There were lots of people like Meg across Pollock who saw this as a reminder of the radicalism of their youth. Grace Moran, then a forty-year-old cleaner, was one of the names on our phone tree. She’s soft-spoken and describes herself as not wanting to go to extremes. It turned out she had been a member of the Young Communist League in her teens.44

Some indication that former Communists did not simply mourn their old organization but got involved in new forms of activity whose inspiration lay elsewhere would have undermined the elegiac mood, but might also have indicated that, important though the CPGB was as a mobilizing force, its passing has not left the gap that his interviewees claim. This also suggests a broader point, which is that just as books dealing with the history of the Labour Party cannot ignore the impact of the Communist Party on its members, particularly in relation to trade union activity, neither can books about the CPGB ignore the way in which the revolutionary left after 1968 was able to successfully attract people who would previously have been drawn to it.

When the CPGB voted to transform itself into the Democratic Left in November 1991 it was already a historical relic, of direct significance mainly to an older generation of activists. As Jackie Kay comments: “It is not a loss for our generation in the same way but I do feel it is very sad on my parents’ behalf.”45 Although other works drawing on interviews have since appeared, we will increasingly have to rely on written sources.46 We should therefore be grateful that Rafeek captured the memories of these party members while it was still possible. It would have been perhaps expecting too much for someone so much in sympathy with the politics of his subjects to provide a critical account, but as a source book and testament Communist Women in Scotland will be of lasting value.