Frank Lee 1944-2026
Long-time Chartist supporter, socialist contrarian and academic Frank Lee died following a dementia diagnosis in 2023 and further complications. Frank was a classic working class intellectual. Post-school he had a variety of jobs, including janitor in a science lab, before becoming a teleprinter operator at Post Office headquarters at Electra House on the banks of the Thames, where I first met him in 1977. An avid reader, he developed a strong interest in politics and an anti-capitalist outlook. He was drawn to the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League led by Gerry Healy, but was far too independent-minded to stay long. Through a mutual contact, we met at Electra House, where we would meet regularly to discuss the waning Labour government of Jim Callaghan and the global state of capitalism. He joined the Labour Party and secured a union scholarship to take a first degree in PPE at Ruskin College, Oxford. There, he developed a small group of friends into a Chartist reader’s group. He joined the Editorial Board, writing regularly for the next 40 years while encouraging numerous like-minded friends to write for the magazine. He wanted to widen Chartist coverage of arts and culture, encouraging friends to write art criticism and interviewing the English Collective of Prostitutes for a piece on the sex industry.
Following graduation, he studied for an MPhil at New College Oxford and the LSE. This led to his book Fabianism and Colonialism, based on the life of Lord Sidney Olivier, the most thorough study of this anti-imperialist Fabian yet published. His sharp intellect, inquiring mind and polemical style produced many insightful articles on the Labour left, political economy, culture, Europe, and theorists from Gramsci to Max Weber and international affairs. He has a long essay in Beyond Blair – Prospects for a New Socialist Left (Chartist 2006) on a new global economic order. We published his counterblast against Eurosceptics, Europe The Unfinished Project (2011), as the first of a series of pamphlets against the Cameron led Coalition. His Paradigm Shifts was a more recent study of modern capitalism.
In 1982, he joined the Sociology department at Kingston college where he lectured in economics for over 18 years. Frustrated by the bureaucracy, he then worked for the Immigration office in Croydon and, in more recent years, became a private tutor.
He was born in Caversham, near Reading of first generation Italian immigrants. The family moved to Camberwell, South London. His father plied ice cream in the summer and hot chestnuts in winter. He was a supportive son to his early widowed mother.
Catholic by birth and Marxist by orientation, Frank had a passion for politics and jazz. An accomplished saxophone player he was an avid fan of the greats like Hank Mobley, John Coltraine and above all Sonny Rollins. He travelled to Ukraine in the early 2000s, where he met Yelena from the Donbas area. They married in 2012. Over the last decade, we moved apart concerning Ukraine, but his contrarian spirit and abiding interest in left politics animated him to the end.