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Nicola Seyd: Grassroots activist and internationalist

By John Haylett

IF the term “grassroots activist” didn’t exist, it would have had to be coined to describe Nicola Seyd whose funeral takes place today in north London.
 
While many activists prioritise politics, trade unionism, community issues, culture or international solidarity, she engaged with them all, building a huge circle of comrades and friends across the spectrum.
 
Paignton-born Seyd, who was 79, was educated at the fee-paying progressive coeducational Dartington Hall school where her father Fred taught French and games while her mother Juliet was a housemistress.
 
WB Curry, who was head teacher from 1931 to 1957, espoused a teaching philosophy based on no punishment, no prefects, no uniforms, no officer training corps, no segregation of the sexes, no compulsory games, religion or anything else, no classics, no competition and no jingoism.
 
Pupils included playwright Sean O’Casey’s son Niall, scientist JD Bernal’s son Martin and Robin and Brian Thompson who would set up Thompsons, the trade union solicitors.
 
Martin Bernal recounts in his Geography of a Life that he and O’Casey challenged an English teacher’s proposal to remove the Daily Worker from the newspaper subscription list, citing freedom of speech grounds.
 
Nicola’s case for keeping the Daily Worker was uncompromising — “it is the only newspaper that tells the truth.”
 
Her fierce commitment to the paper, now the Morning Star, has never dimmed. Her decades-long efforts within the South Camden Morning Star Readers & Supporters Group to raise cash for the Fighting Fund through regular booksales at her local Marchmont Community Centre have won wide appreciation.
 
“They’re mostly sold very cheap so that people can easily afford them. It’s a service as well as a fundraiser,” she told the paper’s readers in one of her regular appeals for more volunteers to assist with sales.
 
Nicola and her parents left Dartington Hall a few years after the second world war to settle in Hackney, where lifelong Communist Party campaigner Monty Goldman remembers their arrival.
 
“Nicola joined the Hackney Young Communist League, while her mum Juliet, who had been in the leadership of the Devon & Cornwall district of the Communist Party, took over as Hackney Communist Party secretary. Fred became a head teacher in Hackney,” he recalls.
 
Nicola attended World Youth Festivals organised by the International Union of Students throughout the 1950s as a singer with the London Youth Choir, visiting Bucharest, Warsaw, Moscow and Vienna. 
 
After studying maths at North London Poly, she went on to serve in the early 1960s as an accredited correspondent of World Student News for the International Union of Students based in Prague.
 
She later completed her MSc in mathematical statistics, studying part-time at Birkbeck University London while working full-time.
 
Before that, she and her brother Kit had flown to recently liberated Cuba to join a student work brigade building a “school city” in the Sierra Maestra mountains.
 
“The idea of the school city was to serve the whole area. It would provide education for little children through to the technical college level,” she told the Cuba Solidarity Campaign magazine Cuba Si many years later.
 
“The school was to be self-supporting. As well as lessons, pupils would farm crops and learn about agriculture.”
 
After a couple of weeks’ hard labour, the volunteers were told that a “special visitor” would be coming to see how their work was progressing.
 
The visitor was Che Guevara, who had also done volunteer labour at the school, and Nicola took many photos as the revolutionary leader chatted to young volunteers from across the globe.
 
Her pictures were developed in London, put into an album and forgotten until she made them available to CSC.
 
Che’s daughter Dr Aleida Guevara, who hadn’t been born yet when the pictures were taken, was shown the images of her father in 2002, commenting: “This lady has given me back a moment of my father’s life. That’s beautiful.”
 
CSC director Rob Miller and secretary Bernard Regan said that people in Britain and Cuba have “lost a true and committed friend” in Nicola, declaring that the finest tribute to her “is to live up to her deep sense of commitment to solidarity and social justice.”
 
Nicola joined the Labour Party rather than the Communist Party of Britain after the Communist Party of Great Britain dissolved itself in 1991 and, despite leaving in protest at the illegal invasion of Iraq, she rejoined, welcoming the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
 
Her experiences of debates in the St Pancras Marxist Study Group on books that members had read brought her into contact with film-maker Chris Reeves and they “decided it would be interesting to hold discussions based around film screenings.”
 
They registered as a community co-operative in 2002 with around 300 members who were all entitled to suggest ideas for screenings and vote to approve the programme.
 
Meeting first in her local Renoir Cinema, the London Socialist Film Co-operative — often showing productions on Cuba, Palestine or Venezuela — has since transferred to the Venezuelan embassy’s Bolivar Hall, with discussions led by speakers such as Corbyn or the late Tony Benn.
 
As well as her work for CSC, she was committed to the Palestinian struggle for independence, being active in the Camden branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and becoming a founding trustee of the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association in 2004. 
 
Nicola’s integration into her surroundings expressed itself not only as a management committee member of the local Marchmont Street community centre but through action on the streets to oppose unwelcome change such as proposals to close the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital or the Marchmont Street post office.
 
She continued her efforts for the Morning Star and, alongside Bradford Morning Star Readers & Supporters Group secretary Ludi Simpson backed the paper’s journalists when they went on strike in 1998.
 
“When it was clear that new management committee members would be needed, Nicola and I were willing to be nominated and co-opted. With Morning Star supporters as our environment, we wished to involve them more in information about the Star’s management committee, which had become remote,” he says. 
 
“We edited and administrated a Morning Star newsletter for four years 2000-2003 until we both resigned.”
 
Nicola was a committed trade unionist as a postal officer, representing her Union of Post Office Workers (now Communication Workers Union) branch on Camden Trades Council and playing leading roles as trades council secretary and on both the Greater London Association of Trades Union Councils and the Southern & Eastern Region TUC.
 
Despite poor health towards the end of her life, she regularly overcame pain and breathlessness to take a bus to Trafalgar Square to join National Gallery striking workers on the PCS picket line.
 
Trade unionists in Camden responded quickly to the news of her death by recording their love and respect for her, some noting the disagreements — occasionally sharp — that were part and parcel of comradely interchange.
 
Her daughter Lisa remembers Nicola as an optimist and someone who recognised that ordinary people had the power to change things.
 
“She always looked for solutions and her commitment to justice, equality and strong independent women mattered immensely to me.”
 
The fact that Nicola was a single parent meant that many meetings took place at her flat so that Lisa remembers “the lull of the voices coming from downstairs as a very normal, very comforting sound for me to fall asleep to.”
 
A full living room was as much part of Lisa’s upbringing as the constant presence of a shopping trolley used to transport stock for the Morning Star book sales.
 
There were regular visits to their flat by trade unionists arriving in London for meetings and needing a bed and two miners stayed there during the 1984-5 miners’ strike.
 
Nicola had an allotment in Finchley, where they would often spend days working, even if she ended up dropping off the veg she had grown to striking firefighters.
 
Lisa recalls going with her mum to Greenham Common, the People’s March for Jobs and, with three of Lisa’s friends, to the republican day out to France when Charles Windsor married Diana Spencer.
 
“Mum was slightly disgusted to find me and my friend peering through the window of a TV shop to see what the dress looked like,” she smiles.
 
Lisa accepts that her upbringing was probably a little unconventional, suggesting that Nicola was just as extraordinary as a grandmother to her children Fred and Ruby, either taking them out youth hostelling or visiting them at their home in Brighton, discussing politics or learning about public transport.
 
“The strange thing about growing up with my mum was that there was nothing to rebel against, because there was always room for negotiations. She was very fair,” says Lisa.
 
“Now in my own parenting I find myself referring back and asking what my mum would have said in this situation.”
 
  • Nicola Seyd’s funeral takes place today at 3pm, Golders Green Crematorium, Hoop Lane, London NW11 7NL. Nearest Tube Golders Green. Her family asks that donations are made in her memory to the Morning Star.
 
 
 
 
 

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