Chris Birch

Christopher Berkeley Peyton Birch was born in 1928 in St Kitts, which was then the British West Indies, the son of Norman Peyton Birch and Iris Berkeley King.  His father was the accountant at the St Kitts branch of Barclays Bank; his mother's family had been in the West Indies for nearly 300 years. As a child he spent ten years in St Kitts, followed by seven years schooling in Trinidad and a year in Barbados before going to England in 1946.

At Bristol University, he joined the Communist Party in 1948 and met and fell in love with Betty, his wife and life-long partner whom he married in 1950.

Chris and Betty went to Budapest in 1955, where he was a Young Communist League representative. There he served on the preparatory committee for a world youth festival organised by the World Federation of Democratic Youth. Their time in Hungary enabled them to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the communist government in that country and its failure to respond flexibly to demands for democratic change.

On their return to London, Birch and his comrade Charlie Coutts wrote a memo to John Gollan who had recently succeeded Harry Pollitt as party general secretary. It dealt with questions of democracy, corruption and their view that the Hungarian Communist Party "had been reduced almost to political impotence," largely because of a "widely held view that no major question could be decided without Moscow's approval." Gollan did not reply but handed it over to the Soviet ambassador in 1956 to be forwarded to Moscow.  Birch served for many years in the British-Hungarian Friendship Society while Coutts settled in Hungary, from where he wrote regularly to the Morning Star until he died in 2000.

A journalist for most of his working life, he was editor of a local government weekly for 13 years, taught journalism at the London College of Printing (now known as the London College of Communications), and was a journalist and sub-editor on the Morning Star, for a period of three-and-a-half years.

Fulfilling roles such as a NUJ activist, party branch officer, treasurer of the International Brigade Memorial Appeal and author of Communist Party policy on HIV/Aids, he remained a member of the CPGB until 1991 when it dissolved itself into the short-lived Democratic Left. Although Chris and Betty Birch still regard themselves as Communists, despite not having been a member of any communist organisation since 1991.

Chris’ own bisexuality has been open and accepted within a very happy marriage. He has given voluntary work at London Lighthouse from the earliest days of the HIV epidemic, along with the Terrence Higgins Trust, the Kobler HIV Clinic at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and Westminster Abbey. Chris works as a volunteer at the Abbey, despite being an atheist. In May 2007, he was elected a governor of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

He published his autobiography “My Life: The Caribbean, Communism, Budapest 1956, journalism, HIV/Aids, London Lighthouse, Diana's funeral, Westminster Abbey, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital." (This may be ordered from www.StChristopherPress.com.)