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by
A life spent in the labour movement.
After a Jewish childhood in Manchester between the wars, Phil Kaiserman went on to join the Young Communist League. Days spent working in a barbers' shop were broken by weekends on the Yorkshire Moors with his left-wing comrades. But then came war, and Phil found himself posted to India with the RAF, and later to Vietnam, where he saw at first-hand "man's inhumanity to man," and the political compromises made by the Allies in the dawning days of the Cold War. Returning to England, he worked in barbers' shops, his own newspaper shop, and lastly in a paper mill, where his trade union activities were an important part of his life. Retirement didn't slow him down. Campaigning for the miners during the strike of 1984-5, and against the Poll Tax, he helped set up the Bury Pensioners' Association. During this time he was spending his holidays in the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, seeing what life was really like behind the Iron Curtain. Tales of politics are interspersed with family life, from a marriage his parents tried to stop to caravan holidays in Scotland with his grandchildren. A fascinating story of one man's view of the twentieth century.
About the author
I am 84 years old ,
married to my wife Clare for 64 years. I have spent all
my adult
life in the Labour Movement. My parents were immigrants, arriving
in
Britain at the end of the 19th Century, my father from Poland and
mother
from Austria. On retiring at the age of 62, I helped found
and became
Chairman of the Bury Pensioners Association, a post
that I held for over 20
years. I served in the RAF for 5 years and
wrote my story, From Barber Shop
to Paper Mill, when I was
75.
Chapter 1: Early
Days
Chapter 2: The
Park
Chapter 3:
Adolescence
Chapter 4:
Conversion
Chapter 5:
Spain
Chapter 6: Peak
District
Chapter 7: 1939
Chapter
8: War
Chapter 9: Clare
Chapter
10: Call Up
Chapter 11:
India
Chapter 12:
Vietnam
Chapter 13: Waffen
SS
Chapter 14: Cap St
Jaques
Chapter 15:
Mountbatten
Chapter
16: Homeward Bound
Chapter
17: Anti-Fascism
Chapter 18:
Cold War
Chapter 19: Shude
Hill
Chapter 20:
Sunnybank
Chapter 21: RPM
Chapter
22: Retired
Chapter 23:
Miners' Strike
Chapter 24:
Holidays
Epilogue
Index
of Web Links
This
work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.