Jean McCrindle (1937-2022)
by Andrew Whitehead
This obituary of Jean McCrindle was published in History Workshop Journal in 2024. The text posted here is as submitted - the published version may vary slightly; it also includes more images than the version in History Workshop Journal.
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Jean McCrindle was at the heart of three of the most crucial moments of the British left of the last century, all of which she wrote about. She was present at the birth of the New Left in the late 1950s, as socialist intellectuals sought to strike a path independent of both Stalinism and social democracy; she was a part of the re-emergence of the feminist movement a decade later; and she was a prominent figure in the solidarity campaign during the miners’ strike of 1984–5, in which she helped to develop new forms of women’s organization to sustain the strikers’ communities.
Jean was a feminist and socialist, an adult educator and historian, whose energy and vivaciousness won her many friends – though she had a knack for losing friends as well. She was born in April 1937 into a Communist household. Her father, the Scottish actor Alex (or Alec) McCrindle, was celebrated for his starring role in the immensely popular radio serial ‘Dick Barton, Special Agent’. Her maternal grandfather had been a coal miner in South Wales. Her parents split up when Jean was young, and she went to live with her mother and stepfather. She looked back on much of her childhood as painful and unhappy, interspersed with warmer memories of time spent with her father and his second wife, the writer, Honor Arundel, and their daughters.
From Highbury Hill High School for Girls in North London and A-Levels at Regent Street Polytechnic, she went in 1955 to the University of St Andrews on the Fife coast to study history. By then she had joined the Communist Party, and politics became the dominant chord in her life. At a Communist student gathering in party headquarters, she got to know Raphael Samuel, a student at Balliol College, Oxford. ‘My life’s ambition was to be a Party organizer’, Samuel reminisced, ‘and Jean McCrindle seemed an ideal comrade.’[1] They became engaged – Samuel recalled that he proposed on the summit of Arthur’s Seat overlooking Edinburgh. She travelled to Oxford whenever she could and got to know Samuel’s Balliol friends, one of whom, Peter Sedgwick, reputedly gave her the complete works of Stalin as a birthday present.
Jean McCrindle (left) when a student at St Andrew's - photo, Claire Rohdie
The profound political ruptures of 1956 – first Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality, and then in the autumn the concurrent crises of Britain’s invasion of Suez and the Soviet-led suppression of the Hungarian Uprising – disrupted all the Communist verities. In Yorkshire, two Communist historians, Edward Thompson and John Saville, challenged party discipline by publishing The Reasoner, which helped to crystallize the mounting discontent in party ranks. McCrindle and Samuel were part of the exodus out of the party; her father remained in. Half a century later, she wrote for this journal her own deeply resonant memoir of those heady and unsettling times. ‘For me,’ she recalled, ‘the shock of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 confirmed for ever my youthful scepticism, realism and desire to be free from the hold that 1917 had had on our and my parents’ generation.’[2]
The following year, Thompson and Saville, having left the CP, established the New Reasoner, while Samuel, along with Stuart Hall and others, founded Universities and Left Review. In 1960, these two journals coalesced to become New Left Review. A nationwide network of New Left clubs developed, and Jean McCrindle became the first secretary of the clubs in Scotland, organizing speakers and nurturing a sense of common purpose.
The following year, Thompson and Saville, having left the CP, established the New Reasoner, while Samuel, along with Stuart Hall and others, founded Universities and Left Review. In 1960, these two journals coalesced to become New Left Review. A nationwide network of New Left clubs developed, and Jean McCrindle became the first secretary of the clubs in Scotland, organizing speakers and nurturing a sense of common purpose.
Jean McCrindle and Raphael Samuel in Trafalgar Square, 1956
She also played an important part in the only significant electoral initiative of the early New Left. A widely admired Scottish miners’ leader, Lawrence Daly, left the Communist Party and established the Fife Socialist League. McCrindle contributed a policy manifesto to the League’s journal, The Socialist, describing ‘a mood of disgust and disillusionment with all existing Left parties, and a desire to find a new way of revitalising and creating a Socialist movement’.[3] Daly was elected to Fife County Council and contested the once Communist-held Parliamentary constituency of West Fife in the 1959 election. It was an insurgent campaign which attracted great enthusiasm, both locally and among the wider New Left. Daly came third, with 10% of the vote but ahead of the Communist candidate. When Edward Thompson went to Fife to campaign for Daly, he met up with Jean; they embarked on an intense relationship – McCrindle spoke of Thompson as the love of her life – which, for her at least, ended in crushing unhappiness.
McCrindle was younger and less intellectually confident than much of her friendship group. ‘I was living ... among Giants’, she recalled many decades later. ‘I could listen to them and read their articles but I was silenced and in awe of their knowledge and experience’.[4] That was part of a pattern in her life – allowing her strengths and achievements to be overshadowed by the charismatic men who were close to her. She got a job based in Glasgow as a tutor and organizer for the Workers’ Educational Association, where – among other projects – she set up afternoon classes for women. This was her introduction to a career in adult education, for which she displayed both passion and talent.
In 1963, she took a post with the University of Ghana to help set up its extra-mural department. ‘Ghana is not the Foreign Legion’, counselled Edward Thompson[5] - but for Jean, perhaps it was. In Ghana she met an American anthropologist, Sam Rohdie (later a prominent film scholar). On their return to Britain, the couple married. McCrindle later confided that while she regarded marriage as inconsistent with her feminism, she had relented largely to help Sam avoid military service in Vietnam. They split up not long after the birth of their daughter, Claire.
When at the close of the 1960s the Women’s Movement was reborn, it absorbed Jean as much as communism had fifteen years earlier, as Sally Alexander evocatively recalls in her accompanying appreciation. McCrindle was always clear that feminism did not mean renouncing the politics that defined her early life. ‘Jean wanted to connect feminism and socialism,’ recalled her friend and comrade Sheila Rowbotham, ‘but commented wryly that it was not easy to take the intimacy of small consciousness-raising groups outwards.’[6] They collaborated in publishing Dutiful Daughters, a collection of oral testimonies by women from non-privileged backgrounds ranging in age from the early thirties to over seventy. They ‘discovered in the women we were interviewing the same fascination we had found when women described their lives and shared their formerly private complaints in small groups in the Women’s Movement.’[7]
Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham also collaborated in Beyond the Fragments, a feminist-led initiative to regroup and repurpose the left which developed from the socialist feminist text of the same name published in 1979.[8] McCrindle supported the feminist publisher Virago and was active in the Women’s Peace Movement. At the Northern College in South Yorkshire, a residential adult education college where McCrindle taught women’s studies for many years, she took pride in empowering her women students just as she had done in Glasgow earlier in her career.
McCrindle was younger and less intellectually confident than much of her friendship group. ‘I was living ... among Giants’, she recalled many decades later. ‘I could listen to them and read their articles but I was silenced and in awe of their knowledge and experience’.[4] That was part of a pattern in her life – allowing her strengths and achievements to be overshadowed by the charismatic men who were close to her. She got a job based in Glasgow as a tutor and organizer for the Workers’ Educational Association, where – among other projects – she set up afternoon classes for women. This was her introduction to a career in adult education, for which she displayed both passion and talent.
In 1963, she took a post with the University of Ghana to help set up its extra-mural department. ‘Ghana is not the Foreign Legion’, counselled Edward Thompson[5] - but for Jean, perhaps it was. In Ghana she met an American anthropologist, Sam Rohdie (later a prominent film scholar). On their return to Britain, the couple married. McCrindle later confided that while she regarded marriage as inconsistent with her feminism, she had relented largely to help Sam avoid military service in Vietnam. They split up not long after the birth of their daughter, Claire.
When at the close of the 1960s the Women’s Movement was reborn, it absorbed Jean as much as communism had fifteen years earlier, as Sally Alexander evocatively recalls in her accompanying appreciation. McCrindle was always clear that feminism did not mean renouncing the politics that defined her early life. ‘Jean wanted to connect feminism and socialism,’ recalled her friend and comrade Sheila Rowbotham, ‘but commented wryly that it was not easy to take the intimacy of small consciousness-raising groups outwards.’[6] They collaborated in publishing Dutiful Daughters, a collection of oral testimonies by women from non-privileged backgrounds ranging in age from the early thirties to over seventy. They ‘discovered in the women we were interviewing the same fascination we had found when women described their lives and shared their formerly private complaints in small groups in the Women’s Movement.’[7]
Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham also collaborated in Beyond the Fragments, a feminist-led initiative to regroup and repurpose the left which developed from the socialist feminist text of the same name published in 1979.[8] McCrindle supported the feminist publisher Virago and was active in the Women’s Peace Movement. At the Northern College in South Yorkshire, a residential adult education college where McCrindle taught women’s studies for many years, she took pride in empowering her women students just as she had done in Glasgow earlier in her career.
Teaching at Northern College - photo, Claire Rohdie
The Northern College was based amid one of Britain’s largest, and most militant, coalfields, and McCrindle developed a strong personal and political alliance with Arthur Scargill, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers. She was an ardent supporter of the year-long miners’ strike which began in March 1984, by far the most bitter confrontation between trades unions and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. In the early weeks of the strike, McCrindle helped set up in Barnsley one of the first women’s support groups. She used her bonds with the Women’s Liberation Movement to involve prominent feminists in solidarity activity.
In May, thousands of women from support groups across the country – many more than the organizers expected - came to Barnsley for a rally. It was ‘indescribably exciting – electric, unconventional, joyful, exuberant – chanting, witty, ebullient’, McCrindle confided in her diary.[9] She later described it as ‘the best day of my life’.[10] This paved the way for the creation of the national Women Against Pit Closures organisation, closely aligned to the NUM national leadership and a landmark in women’s organization in support of an overwhelmingly male group of strikers. McCrindle took on the crucial role of national treasurer of the Women Against Pit Closures movement, helping to route funds to the mining communities most in need. She also volunteered at soup kitchens, joined picket lines and strove to maintain morale amid the government’s use of police and the courts to crush the strike. She later completed a doctoral thesis about the Women Against Pit Closures campaign and deposited some of the records she had drawn on at the Women’s Library, now at the London School of Economics.[11]
A further cache of papers deposited at the Women’s Library shortly before McCrindle’s death, and at the time of writing still to be catalogued, offers a remarkable insight into the web of bank accounts and funding routes to which the NUM resorted in a vain attempt to keep the strike going. When the miners’ union was hit by sequestration and then receivership, McCrindle was drawn into covert efforts to channel money from organizations which supported the strike. At the initiative of prominent figures in the NUM, she and a colleague opened a bank account in the name of the Sheffield Women’s Action Group – the acronym cannot have been lost on those involved – through which more than a million pounds was routed. Many of the payments in and withdrawals were in cash, sometimes involving tens of thousands of pounds.
She also opened in her own name bank accounts in Dublin, into which the International Miners’ Organization – of which Arthur Scargill was president – paid money. This was part of a much larger network of unofficial bank accounts. When the NUM commissioned a leading barrister, Gavin Lightman, to investigate press allegations of large cash donations from Libya and the Soviet Union, McCrindle told him she believed there had been no Libyan money – but accepted that many in the union would have been happy to take such money if available. According to a close friend, she at one point during the strike kept a suitcase stuffed full of dollar notes under her bed; she also prevailed upon a friend in Hackney to look after several sealed plastic bags without telling her friend what was in them.
At High Peak - photo, Claire Rohdie
Jean was at this time an active member of the Labour Party. She stood for Parliament in the 1983 and 1987 elections; on the latter occasion she achieved a modest swing to Labour in the High Peak constituency, but the strong polling of the Social Democrats deprived her of any chance of winning. She enjoyed campaigning and soap-box style speaking. She was in the centre ground of the Labour Party and backed the leadership of Neil Kinnock and later of Tony Blair. Jean wanted leaders who, in her view, would be able to win power and use it to help working people. Her support for the invasion of Iraq led to a falling out with old friends. An at times disputatious nature also disrupted several longstanding friendships.
Jean McCrindle – a breast cancer survivor – was diagnosed with dementia in 2016, but for several years continued to live independently, with the care and support of her daughter. She died in December 2022 aged 85. Once her personal papers are fully available to researchers, they will prove to be an important source about the currents within the British left in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as revealing a complex and courageous personal and political life.
[1] Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism, London, 2006, p. 88. Raphael Samuel, at this time known as Ralph Samuel, went on to establish the History Workshop movement.
[2] Jean McCrindle, ‘The Hungarian Uprising and a Young British Communist’, History Workshop Journal 62, 2006, pp. 194–9. McCrindle also wrote about her involvement in the New Left in ‘Reading The Golden Notebook in 1962’ in Notebooks/Memoirs/Archives: Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing, ed. Jenny Taylor, London, 1982, pp. 43–56.
[3] The Socialist 1: 2, March 1960.
[4] McCrindle, ‘Hungarian Uprising’, p. 197.
[5] Edward Thompson to Jean McCrindle, 12 September 1963, in a so far uncatalogued section of McCrindle’s papers at the Women’s Library, London School of Economics. I am very grateful to Claire Rohdie and to Anna Towlson and her colleagues at the Women’s Library for allowing me access to these papers. Claire has written an appreciation of her mother which is available online: https://alumni.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2023/08/21/a-life-less-ordinary-dr-jean-mccrindle-1937-2022/.
[6] Sheila Rowbotham, Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s, London, 2021, p. 29.
[7] Dutiful Daughters: Women Talk About their Lives, ed. Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham, London, 1977, p. 8.
[8] Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, Newcastle and London, 1979.
[9] Natalie Thomlinson and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘National Women Against Pit Closures: Gender, Trade Unionism, and Community Activism’, Contemporary British History 32: 1, 2018, pp. 78–100.
[10] Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham, ‘More than Just a Memory: Some Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike, 1984-85’, Feminist Review, 23, June 1986, pp. 109–24.
[11] Jean McCrindle, ‘The National Organisation of Women Against Pit Closures in the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5’, Oxford Brookes PhD thesis, 2001. Papers of Jean McCrindle, 7JMC, Women’s Library, London School of Economics.
Jean McCrindle – a breast cancer survivor – was diagnosed with dementia in 2016, but for several years continued to live independently, with the care and support of her daughter. She died in December 2022 aged 85. Once her personal papers are fully available to researchers, they will prove to be an important source about the currents within the British left in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as revealing a complex and courageous personal and political life.
[1] Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism, London, 2006, p. 88. Raphael Samuel, at this time known as Ralph Samuel, went on to establish the History Workshop movement.
[2] Jean McCrindle, ‘The Hungarian Uprising and a Young British Communist’, History Workshop Journal 62, 2006, pp. 194–9. McCrindle also wrote about her involvement in the New Left in ‘Reading The Golden Notebook in 1962’ in Notebooks/Memoirs/Archives: Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing, ed. Jenny Taylor, London, 1982, pp. 43–56.
[3] The Socialist 1: 2, March 1960.
[4] McCrindle, ‘Hungarian Uprising’, p. 197.
[5] Edward Thompson to Jean McCrindle, 12 September 1963, in a so far uncatalogued section of McCrindle’s papers at the Women’s Library, London School of Economics. I am very grateful to Claire Rohdie and to Anna Towlson and her colleagues at the Women’s Library for allowing me access to these papers. Claire has written an appreciation of her mother which is available online: https://alumni.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2023/08/21/a-life-less-ordinary-dr-jean-mccrindle-1937-2022/.
[6] Sheila Rowbotham, Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s, London, 2021, p. 29.
[7] Dutiful Daughters: Women Talk About their Lives, ed. Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham, London, 1977, p. 8.
[8] Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, Newcastle and London, 1979.
[9] Natalie Thomlinson and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘National Women Against Pit Closures: Gender, Trade Unionism, and Community Activism’, Contemporary British History 32: 1, 2018, pp. 78–100.
[10] Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham, ‘More than Just a Memory: Some Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike, 1984-85’, Feminist Review, 23, June 1986, pp. 109–24.
[11] Jean McCrindle, ‘The National Organisation of Women Against Pit Closures in the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5’, Oxford Brookes PhD thesis, 2001. Papers of Jean McCrindle, 7JMC, Women’s Library, London School of Economics.