Ernest Rogers

Ernest Rogers (1914–2004) was a Trotskyist activist based in Glasgow, Coventry and London during the twentieth century. Towards the end of his life he was known as the last living Oehlerite.

Early life Rogers was born in 1914 in Glasgow to a Scottish mother and a father of Jewish and Gypsy ancestry. When the debate about entryism split the CLA, Rogers and the Leninist League supported Hugo Oehler and affiliated to the Revolutionary Workers League. From 1937 Rogers was based in Coventry where he organised a second branch of the Leninist League.

During the Second World War, on which the League took a revolutionary defeatist position, Rogers served three months in HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs for identity card offences, after which he retired from political activism.

Rogers was close friends with C. L. R. James, with whose group the Leninist League had discussed a merger, and Raya Dunayevskaya who stayed with him during her trip to England. He became involved with the Revolutionary History group in his later years.