In 1935, in Berlin, Angela Gradwell Tuckett was dropped from the England hockey team, supposedly for refusing to give a Nazi salute - and the thing is, that probably doesn't even make the top three of the rebellious acts in her long life.
She was born on the 15th January 1906, in Clifton, Bristol, her father a well-to-do solicitor and her mother a ballet teacher and choreographer. Her very posh vowel sounds continued to strike people throughout her life, particularly when she sang in folk clubs, though her family tree was also decorated with various pillars of the anti-Establishment, including Aunt Enid, a militant orator and founding member of the Independent Labour Party.
Leaving school at 16, Angela became the first female law student in Bristol and subsequently the city's first female solicitor. Growing up in a family where discussions about politics, and social encounters with prominent socialists, were commonplace, it didn't take much for Angela to become involved in left-wing activity. Seeing the 1931 Hunger March baton-charged by police as it passed through Bristol convinced her to join the Communist Party.
By the time she married a Marxist university lecturer in 1931, Angela had already suffered a backstreet abortion. The marriage was not enduring; apart from anything, she seems to have been infuriated by her husband's preference for theory over political involvement. As a left-wing lawyer she was in increasing demand representing trade unionists and other dissidents who, in times of economic depression and industrial unrest, were being arrested in great numbers.
Around this time, Angela won flying lessons in a newspaper competition. She was evidently very good at it, and qualified easily as a pilot, though the hobby was too expensive for her to pursue it for long. She was an excellent hockey player, at school and as an adult, and played for England between 1931 and 1935. The story about the Heil Hitler salute has become a muddled anecdote over the years, but what is clear is that Angela's refusal to praise the "new Germany" to local reporters (she was already a committed anti-fascist) infuriated her team's managers and government minders, and she was never again selected for the national side.
(Incidentally, I refer to her throughout as Angela mainly because no-one seems able to agree on what her full name was. She was variously known to different circles as Angela Tuckett, Angela Gradwell, Angela Tuckett Gradwell, and Angela Gradwell Tuckett. But all of them agree on Angela. Speaking of names, Angela's brother was called Coldstream Tuckett, which these days would surely be the name of a Californian film actress.)
When Franco seized power in Spain, Angela helped establish a Spanish support committee in Bristol, which campaigned under the historically undeniable slogan "Bombs on Barcelona mean Bombs on Bristol." On one occasion, much to the annoyance of her husband, she was involved in smuggling funds to communist resistance groups in Athens.
The marriage broke up during World War Two, which he passed as an academic in the USA and she spent in London as the top lawyer at the National Council for Civil Liberties and then at the Daily Worker as a legal advisor and a reporter. As a Communist Party journalist, particularly on Labour Monthly, she gained a reputation as a precise but humorous writer.
In 1962 Angela married joiner and craft teacher (and former professional rugby league player with Hull KR) Ike Gradwell, like her an active trade unionist and peace campaigner, and they set up home in Swindon, not so far from her Bristol roots. An engineering town, Swindon had a strong Communist Party branch of which Ike was a well-known leader.
Though now retired as a journalist, Angela never stopped writing. She was a lifelong and faithful diarist, and a tireless contributor to the letters pages of newspapers. She was a writer and producer of plays, a poet, a pamphleteer, a songwriter and a labour historian. Several sources remark that she seemed to live 25-hour days, always leading an extraordinarily busy life. She and Ike (and his daughter) often stood for parliament and the local council as CP candidates.
An exceptionally happy marriage was ended by Ike's death in 1979. Heartbroken, Angela saw out the rest of her days as she had spent them all - campaigning, writing, selling the Morning Star around town every day, driving people mad with her inflexible opinions, and playing music. She would take her accordion along to picket lines, rallies and protests, where her musical skills were enjoyed or endured by captive audiences. She busked to raise money for her causes, and she also sang and played at folk clubs. Despite her expertise at the instrument, some noted that she "didn't always know when to stop." Others were less complimentary.
(Entirely without intention on my part, I note that we've now had two concertina-playing communists in a row, following Walter Greaves last week. Is there a particular affinity between these two things? I have no idea, although of course the British folk music revival of the mid-20th century was largely a Communist Party project. Do Trotskyists often favour the kazoo? Are Maoists frequently proficient on the washboard? Certainly, many Conservatives turn out to be a dab hand at the cottage upright.)
In the 1980s, Angela was very active in supporting the miners' strike. Her biographer records a story told to her that Angela, the former solicitor, even assisted in "liberating" food from a government storage depot to donate to miners' families. In her final years, living in a local care home, she suffered from dementia - though that didn't stop her going on her wanders around town every day, with her accordion and her campaign leaflets.
She died in 1994, but was remembered in Swindon long afterwards - perhaps even to this day - as an eccentric old woman, certainly, forever popping up with her dreaded accordion and her hat covered with left-wing badges; but also as one of the town's greatest characters and a fighter for justice who never surrendered, even to Hitler, even to old age, even to illness.
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Sources:
Angela remembered by Rosie MacGregor (WaterMarx 2015)
www.wcml.org.uk/our-collections/activists/angela-tuckett/
www.bristollawsociety.com/angela-and-joan-tuckett/
www.bath.ac.uk/library/cabinet-of-curiosities/story/4
www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/news/17312613.swindon-campaigner-defiant-hitlers-olympics/