Jimmy Deane

Jimmy Deane (31 January 1921 – 21 August 2002) was a British Trotskyist who played a significant role in building the Revolutionary Socialist League. Along with Jock Haston and Ted Grant, he played a role during the Second World War in the Revolutionary Communist Party, the British section of the Fourth International.

Early years

Jimmy Deane was born in Liverpool to a blacksmith, Gus Deane, and his wife, Gertie, a trained nurse. Deane came from a long line of trade unionists in the Labour movement in Merseyside – Deane's maternal grandfather Charles Carrick was elected president of the Liverpool Trades Council in 1905, served for fourteen years as one of Labour's first councillors, and was an organiser for the Marxist Social Democratic Federation. Carrick, like many trade unionists at that time, remained active within the Labour Party when the Social Democratic Federation left. Deane's mother and brothers were all in the Trotskyist movement and were members of the Walton Constituency Labour Party in the 1950s and 1960s. The origins of Trotskyism to which the Deanes were attracted can be traced to Albert Houghton, a founding member of the Communist Party in Merseyside who had drawn Trotskyist conclusions and fought the Stalinists in Merseyside who later became leading Labour figures.

Joining the Labour Party in 1937, he was later that year won over to Trotskyism and joined the Militant Group. In January 1944 he was trained as a miner, due to wartime legislation, and worked at Nook Pit, Tyldesley before he was invalided out of work at the end of the year. He stayed in Paris for a further 18 months as the British representative on the International Executive Committee. At the end of his life he declared his support for the Socialist Appeal tendency, and emphasised that "A Marxist tendency must combat any traces of ultra-leftism that arise out of impatience". Jimmy Deane died of pneumonia alone on 21 August 2002 at the Rosebank Nursing Home in Liverpool.