Jim Crump

Crump was a long-standing figure in the Birmingham and Midlands Communist Parties from 1926 to the early 1970s.

His father, also James Crump, was Midlands Area Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union. James Crump Senior was born on 25th August 1873 at Bromsgrove and lived for many years at 235 Great Colmore Street. Noted as being a prolific smoker of huge cigars, he served for many years in Birmingham as a Labour councillor and JP. As such, Crump Senior was prominent in ingloriously bringing the 1926 general strike in Birmingham to an end.  The city’s Trade Union Emergency Committee had contained a handful of Labour magistrates, a councillor in the shape of Crump senior, and other worthy moderates and all their work seemed devoted to aiding the other side.

Jim Crump (Junior) now threw himself into Communist Party work. By 1932, we find him as one of those agitators whose leafleting had spurred Jessie Eden (see separate entry) at the outset of the mass `girls’ strike’ of Lucas employees in 1932. “James Walter Crump of 104 Latimer Street” was seized by the police when trying to hold a Communist May Day rally. [Birmingham Post June 4th 1932]

Jim Crump was heavily involved in all the major events of the 1930s, including major agitation amongst council tenants that resulted in the great rent strike of 1939, the year when his father became Lord Mayor of Birmingham!

He was a candidate for the Communist Party in the 1950 general election for the Birmingham Sparkbrook constituency, maintained loyal support for the Party through thick and thin and died in the mid-1970s.