TRIBUTES have been paid to a leading communist in north-west England who led one of Britain’s biggest branches of the Young Communist League, and became its first full-time secretary.

Vic Eddisford, who has died at the age of 96, became full-time secretary of Manchester and Salford branch of the Young Communist League in 1949 at the age of 24, and went on to work full-time for the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) for more than three decades, including at national level.

He was also active at an international level, taking part in delegate visits to Russia representing the CPGB.

As a young man in the 1940s, among his senior contemporaries in Manchester were Benny Rothman, leader of the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass, and Eddie Frow, later joint founder with his wife Ruth of the Working Class Movement Library in Salford in Greater Manchester.

His friend and comrade Bob Heald said: “With the influence of people like that it would have been surprising if he had not joined the Communist Party.”

Vic Eddisford was born in 1925 in Manchester. His father died young when Vic was a small child, and his mother brought him up as a lone parent.

His childhood in the late 1920s and the 1930s was hard and his experiences influenced his political views and development as a teenager.

He left school at 15, became an apprentice engineer at Metro Vickers in Trafford Park in Manchester and joined the Young Communist League.

The factory was one of the biggest and most important heavy engineering facilities in Britain and the world. There he joined the Amalgamated Engineering Union and met and was influenced by Rothman and Frow.

“The factory had a large branch of the CPGB,” his daughter Pamela said, “it was after the war when the Russians were still seen as our allies.”

Eddisford was a speaker at factory gate meetings which were a regular feature of the party’s activities there.

In 1949 Manchester and Salford branch of the YCL was so large that it merited the appointment of its first full-time secretary. Vic Eddisford was appointed to do the job. He was 24.

At the Metro Vickers factory he met and married his wife Margaret who worked in the office. The couple had two sons and two daughters.

His daughter said of his time at the factory: “A big part of his life was addressing workers outside the factory. They sold 200 Daily Workers a day.

“In 1949 he became the YCL full-time branch secretary in Manchester — their first. Later he became the Manchester CP area secretary. He worked full time for the party from 1949 until 1980.”

In 1968 he moved with his family to London after being appointed national election agent for the CPGB. He also served on the party’s national executive committee. In 1972 he returned to Manchester as CPGB North West district secretary.

His marriage to Margaret had dissolved and he married his second wife Ann Fleetwood. 

He contested parliamentary seats for the CPGB. At the general election in 1967 he stood for Gorton in Manchester when the Conservative candidate was Winston Churchill Jnr, grandson of former prime minister Winston Churchill. 

Eddisford lost, but so did Churchill. Labour won.

His visits to Russia included representing the CPGB at an international conference attended by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

In the 1980s he returned to work in engineering.

His daughter said: “The party at that time had a policy of full-time workers going back into their original jobs before they retired so that they would have a pension. 

“That was for the last 10 years of his working life by which time he had moved to Glossop [in Derbyshire].”

His activism continued in the 1980s and 1990s in Glossop. He served as secretary of Glossop Trade Union Council and was involved in the town’s support group for striking mine workers and their families during the 1984-5 battle against pit closures, and again in 1994 in the campaign against the Tories’ final privatisation and butchery of the industry.

He was involved in the reinvigoration of Glossop Labour Club, one of Britain’s oldest independent socialist clubs, founded in 1906.

Part of his legacy is that today the club thrives. It is also part of the Socialist Network of left social clubs, along with others such as Bolton Socialist Club in Greater Manchester, the Red Shed (Wakefield Labour Club) and the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge, both in West Yorkshire.

He was also involved in campaigning work with pensioners’ groups and other campaigns in Derbyshire.

His friend and comrade Bob Heald said: “In Glossop he did a lot of work with elderly people’s campaigns. Vic’s involvement with local people and local politics was profound.”

Victor Thomas Eddisford died on Christmas Day, 2021.

His funeral takes place at 1.30pm on Thursday January 13, at Cypress Chapel, Stockport Crematorium and Cemetery, Buxton Road, Heaviley, Stockport SK2 6LS.

Donations in lieu of flowers should be made out to Glossop Women’s Aid and sent to c/o Arthur Worsley Funeral Directors, 113 Station Road, Hadfield, Glossop SK13 1AA.

PETER LAZENBY