Obituaries – John Lee, Malcolm MacKay
John Lee
John Lee, an active member of the Party for many decades, died in April at the age of 92. He joined the old Tottenham branch in 1949 as a teenager and was involved in its various successor branches. He worked as a clerical officer in Customs and Excise, his only job and it was whilst working there that he heard our speakers at Tower Hill. He managed to avoid National Service about this time because of defective eyesight.
In the ‘60s he was active on our Executive and Publicity Committees. He was a very regular attendee at branch meetings, apart from during a period when he was in hospital for a detached retina operation, and later, in 1980, when he took himself off for a week’s touring holiday in Italy.
In the Party, after retirement, he picked up the basics of computer work, and for years he dealt with general enquiries and requests for the Socialist Standard, working at our Head Office on a weekly basis until a few years ago. He was always ready to leaflet demonstrations or help out at a branch street stall. A quiet but thoughtful man, he was well read. He admitted that he was somewhat terrified of getting up to address an audience, which he sometimes had to do when answering questions about a Committee report to Party Conference. Never a speaker nor a writer, he would only chip in on a discussion if he felt he had something relevant to contribute, and then typically only briefly. The Party has lost a long-serving and hard-working stalwart.
Malcolm MacKay
Glasgow branch regret to have to communicate that comrade Malcolm MacKay has died at the age of 56. He had been ill recently. As a teenager in the 1980s he got involved with the youth section of the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party and for a time was editor of their youth paper in Scotland. It didn’t take him long to see through the idea of a vanguard party leading the workers though, sometime later joining the Socialist Party. He was active in the branch locally as well as contributing the occasional article for publication.