Charlie van Gelderen
"His humanity was inseparable from his socialism"
Message from Tony Southall to the funeral on November 7.
I am deeply sad that I can’t be with you all today for what I am sure will be a celebration of the life of a wonderful man who made a contribution which all of us would love to emulate, but few will, to winning a better world and to the happiness of those around him.
Others will be far better qualified to make a rounded appreciation of a lifetime of political activism stretching from authorship and distribution in Cape Town of the 1932 May Day manifesto of the Workers’ Party of South Africa though his attendance at the founding Congress of the Fourth International in 1938 to his activity in the June 2001 election campaign of the Socialist Alliance; political activity that was always firmly grounded in a deep knowledge and understanding of Marxism and Trotskyism.
But for me Charlie was more than a comrade for 38 years: he became a friend whose humanity I believe was an inseparable part of his socialism.
I’d like to share just three examples.
In 1981 I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Charlie travelled spontaneously from London to York to comfort me, to discuss our continued collaboration around work on Africa – and to advise me coincidentally that continued political activity was a key to combating the effects of MS, something I have tried to maintain however inadequately since then.
That I am still around and doing what I can is something I often put down to that day in York.
In 1987 our old comrade Pat Jordan, a founder of The Week magazine and first full-time secretary of the International Marxist Group, as well as a one-time full timer for the Fourth International was confined to a nursing home near Newark after a chronically disabling stroke.
Charlie was one of the few comrades who maintained contact and visited him at 100 miles distance.
In the late 1980s, Louis Sinclair, bibliographer of Trotsky, who Charlie first met in Italy during the war fell gravely ill in Glasgow. Charlie travelled several times 400 miles from Cambridge to visit him before he died sadly in 1990.
I am certain that other folk who were fortunate enough to know Charlie will have similar things in their minds and will like me be just a little bit jealous of Tessa and Leonora who had such a wonderful father.
Sorry again not to be with you except in spirit, as we all celebrate a life well lived and a friend who gave so much to all of us.