Lifelong Apprenticeship - Life and Times of a Revolutionary

This is a political autobiography with a difference. Born into the Durham working class six years before the 1926 General Strike, Bill Hunter has stayed loyal to his class and dedicated his adult life to the fight against capitalism, and against capitalism’s apologists in the Labour Party and Communist Party.

A Trotskyist from the age of 18, a factory shop steward at 21 and a borough councillor at 32, Bill Hunter has taken some hard knocks - including bureaucratic expulsion from the Labour Party in 1954. Here he recalls these battles with humour, anecdote and documentary evidence.
These pages are crowded with thumbnail sketches of Trotskyist and working class fighters of the period before, during and after the second world war: Harry Wicks, Hugo Dewar, Reg Groves, Gerry Healy, Ted Grant, Tony Cliff, John Lawrence and the stalwart dockers’ champion Harry Constable. There is an affectionate portrait of Bill’s lifelong companion Rae. The book’s heroes are the rank-and-file dockers, engineering workers, and miners in whose struggles Bill played a part, either directly as shop steward or as editor of the lively left-wing journal Socialist Outlook (1948-54).

Lifelong Apprentice shows Hunter’s part in the international struggles of the Fourth International against capitalism and Stalinism, and includes an inside account of the Trotskyists’ response to the 1956-57 crisis in the Communist Party. It ends with the launching of the Socialist Labour League in 1959. Bill Hunter is now working on a second volume covering the years since 1959.

Porcupine Press
ISBN: 1-89943-831-9