Site Guide

What's on this site? The main works of Graham Stevenson - books, pamphlets, articles and speeches.

(1) The single largest information resource is `A Compendium of Communist Biographies', a 300,000 word `encyclopaedia’ of, so far, some one thousand (mainly deceased) Communist Party members. New information on individuals from readers is always welcome. All uncredited biographies are by Graham Stevenson, others are by the named individuals at the end of the subject.

(2) The 330,000 word study, `Defence or Defiance - a people's history of Derbyshire' first written by Graham Stevenson in 1982, this is a study of trade unions and other working class organisations in the county from the 17th century to the early 1970s .

(3) Miscellany a collection of Graham Stevenson's books, speeches and arcticles including, `Anatomy of decline - the Young Communist League (1966-1980)', `In Defence of History’ (2004), `An illustrated guide to trade union history' (2001 / 1980), `The British Security Forces and the Communist Party’, `The Communist Party In The 1980s: Revisionism, Resistance And Re-Establishment’ , `Spartacus and class struggle in ancient Rome’ (1986), various articles (`Historical notes on democratic centralism’, `Dunne and Sullivan- Irish republican martyrs’ (2002), `Is corporatism dead?', `Birmingham Communists in action in the 1930s’, Communist history, The fight to reclaim the Labour Party, the miners' strike 20 years on and the Communist Party, and many speeches. The complete memoirs of three Communists - are also published, namely those of Frank Watters (2004 revised edition), Sid Easton (1991) and Jock and Betty Kane (1992); `Archives from our history' is a collection of miscellaneous reprinted versions of texts from the past. 

Graham Stevenson
About Graham Stevenson PDF Print E-mail

Graham Stevenson is National Organiser for Transport for the TG  Section of Unite - the union   and a member of the Executive Committee and Political Committee of the Communist Party.

This is his personal website, containing many historical resources written or edited by him. There are Communist biographies, a study of Derbyshire, the story of Spartacus, the Young Communist League, and many pieces on the struggles of the past, along with political and historical materials and illustrations. Here is a brief note of personal history: 

I first made contact with the Communist Party in Coventry in 1966, just having turned the age of 16, having counted myself as a Communist for well over a year and a half before that, after reading about Marxism and then finding the Morning Star and other allied Communist publications. Although there was no formal local organisation to join during 1965 and 1966 and I was under the age of being able to join the Communist Party, I was at last was able to formally join the Young Communist League in January 1967 and became Coventry Branch Secretary within a few months. I was initially co-opted onto the Midlands YCL District Committee in May 1968 and was formally elected a member at the District Congress in 1969. I remained a member until May 1978, being a member of the District Executive or Secretariat for all that time. At the 1969 YCL District Congress, I was Chair of the Standing Orders Committee. 

In February 1972 I moved to Birmingham to become the Midlands YCL District Secretary. During my period in Coventry, I was a member of the Draughtsmen’s and Allied Technicians Association Coventry Divisional Council from 1968 and also both the local and National Youth Committee of DATA. I was active in the local Trades Councils and their youth committees in a number of towns across the years. During the 1970s, I was active in the building industry national strike of 1972 in Birmingham and, unlike others elsewhere, was lucky to be found not guilty of conspiracy to trespass in a major case arising from these activities. In 1974, after beginning retraining as a capstan-lathe setter/operator, I joined the Transport and General Workers Union. In the mid to late 1970s, I worked for BSA Guns and was the elected secretary of the Joint Shop Stewards’ Committee there. 

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