Duncan Bowie remembers an expert on early socialist movement and champion of democratic socialism
Ian, who died on 23 December, was a long-term Chartist subscriber and occasional contributor. A socialist historian and activist, he was an expert on the early socialist movement, writing a series of books on the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation. Born in Warwickshire in January 1941, he failed the eleven-plus before joining Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School in Sutton Coldfield at the age of 13. In 1963, he graduated with a BA in History & Government from Sheffield University. Moving to Brighton, he became a lecturer at the Brighton College of Technology, initiating an Access to Higher Education Programme, of which he was director until his retirement in 2003. Ian was later a research fellow and associate tutor at Sussex University. His DPhil thesis at Sussex University, completed in 1982, under the socialist historian, Stephen Yeo, led to a joint-authored book with Logie Barrow – Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement 1880-1914, which was published in 1996. Four years earlier, Ian had co-edited with Richard Pankhurst and contributed to a book on his co-editor’s mother, Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Antifascist. He then published a series of four books on early socialism: Romancing the Revolution – The Myth of Soviet Democracy and the British Left in 2011, Under Siege (on the interwar ILP) in 2017, The Drums of Armageddon (on British socialists and the outbreak of WW1 ) in 2020, and Social-Democracy (with a hyphen) The Politics of the Old Guard of the Social Democratic Federation in 2022. Three of these books were reviewed in Chartist. In the last couple of years, Ian was researching the later history of the Clarion newspaper.
Ten of Ian’s articles for Chartist are published on his website, together with several other papers, including his talk on the Independent Labour Party to the Chartist AGM in 2018:
Articles and Reviews. Ian also published two papers in Socialist History, the second article being in a themed issue on British Labour and Internationalism, which I edited.
A “low profile” political activist (to use Ian’s own words), Ian supported the May Day Manifesto group in the late 1960’s, in the 1970’s contributed to the Voice of the Unions edited by Walter Kendall and was active in NATFHE in the 1970’s and 1980’s. He was a member of the Labour Party from 1964 to his death. He was the founder of the Brighton & Hove Section of the Clarion Cycling Club. He is survived by his wife Sue and their daughter, Chloe.