COME with me back to 1962. I lived in Harlesden, north-west London, already a multicultural part of the city on the edge of what was then the huge collection of light engineering factories that made up the Park Royal estate. 

Park Royal was home to the biggest brewery in the world — it made Guinness. 

Harlesden had a big Irish community with some of the best Irish music to be heard in sessions at the Willesden Junction Hotel — today folk music historians claim it was better than you could hear anywhere in Ireland at the time.

West Indians too were making their homes in Harlesden, but not all of the locals made them welcome. Those notorious window signs “No dogs, No Irish, No Blacks” were still far too common.

My first West Indian mate, Winston, lived two doors down from me. We played cricket against a chalked wicket on the bombsite wall. 

He was a demon bowler. In the late 1950s at the time of the Notting Hill race riots Winston and his family were burnt out of their house by a racist flare-carrying mob. Aged just 12 I watched horrified from my bedroom window. I never saw Winston after that night.

In Harlesden High Street opposite the newly opened Wimpy bar the local Communist Party had a speaker’s box and sold the Daily Worker on Saturday mornings. The paper wouldn’t become the Morning Star until a few years later. 

Les Burt, who stood in many elections for the Communists, and Tom Durkin were among the speakers. I would get to know them well in future years.

However there was one character who sold papers and often spoke who cut a far more exotic figure when he arrived at the meetings on his motorbike. 

With his piratical eye patch, his exotic Basque beret and a huge flapping khaki trench coat, he looked like an IRA member or a resistance fighter in some black-and-white film.

Once I met and got to know him it didn’t take me long to realise that this man had lived a far more exciting life than any fictional movie character. 

That man was Bob Doyle, and his story is a truly remarkable one — of a life dedicated to all kinds of progressive causes all of which he was prepared to fight for. 

I learnt that Bob had been born in Smithfield, Dublin. It was great to see that just recently a plaque has been put up on his birthplace in North King Street to pay tribute to this fighter in the class war.

Bob’s earliest memories were of the appalling poverty of Dublin’s tenements in the 1920s and 1930s. 

He learnt from personal experience just what landlordism and money-lending were, and even at an early age understood that an Irish republic that didn’t champion the rights of the poorest citizens was no republic at all.

He joined Fianna Eireann — the Republican Youth Movement — in his early teens and was soon involved in battling with the Blueshirts, Ireland’s own particularly nasty breed of fascists. 

Bob saw in real life violence, intimidation and contemptuous disregard for democracy as the fascists tried to gain with fist and cudgel the power they could never win at the ballot box. 

Today Ireland conveniently forgets the fact that the Blueshirts established the Fine Gael party in 1933. Blueshirt leader Eoin O’Duffy became the first Fine president.
 
It was at this time Bob cut his political teeth in battles against the Blueshirts. On one occasion he was badly beaten up by Animal Gang thugs and suffered serious permanent damage to one eye. 

The Dublin Animal Gangs were right-wing brutes close to the Blueshirts who used iron hooks, knuckle dusters and potatoes spiked with razor blades in their brawls, strike breaking and anti-IRA activities.

Bob joined the IRA and in its ranks he met the veteran Tipperary freedom fighter, Kit Conway. Conway would be a major influence on Bob, teaching him that the fight for the republic was also a fight for ordinary working women and men to have a better life.

Conway, along with other Irish freedom fighters like Frank Ryan, joined the young Irish Communist Party that was formed in 1933. Bob wasn’t slow to join them. 

When the Spanish civil war broke out many Irish republicans responded with solidarity and support despite the anti-Spanish hysteria whipped up by the rabidly anti-communist Catholic Church.

Bob was among the many republicans and communists who joined the International Brigade. One was Bob’s old comrade and mentor Kit Conway. 

When Bob heard the news that Kit had been killed at Jarama in 1937 he was determined to join up too. He was just 21.

He initially attempted to travel to Spain by stowing away on a ship bound for Valencia. When it docked was detained and expelled. He eventually returned by crossing the Pyrenees from France by night. 

He reported to a battalion at Figueras where along with other IRA volunteers, valued for their military training, he was put to instructing other volunteers. 

Bob decided he wanted to join the more active fighting at the front even if it meant disobeying orders.

He and Frank Ryan were with the Irish contingent captured at Gandesa by Italian fascists. Bob was in a concentration camp near Burgos for 11 months where he was regularly tortured by Spanish guards. 

He was even brought out to face a firing squad during interrogation by the Gestapo.

Prisoners were kept in atrocious conditions but that and beatings and torture never broke their spirit, though Frank Ryan never regained full health after what was done to him. Bob was eventually released in a prisoner exchange.

He never gave up the fight against fascism, joining the Spanish Communist Party and playing a part in the undercover struggle against fascism in Franco’s Spain. He risked death making secret journeys into Spain to meet with the resistance.

He got back to Ireland in 1939 but found jobs hard to find especially for a communist freshly back from Spain and the civil war cause every Catholic priest attacked from the pulpit every Sunday.

Like many other young Irishmen he was driven to move to England where he did find work building air-raid shelters. 

Bob needed to more actively fight the nazis but he just couldn’t bring himself to join his hated British army so he settled for the watery dangers of the merchant navy.

After the war he set up home in Neasden, north London with his Spanish wife Lola. He worked in the printing trade and became active in the Fleet Street unions. 

Arrested in 1959 during a mass picket in support of the 40-hour week, he was charged with riotous assembly but cleared by an Old Bailey jury.

He stood as a Communist candidate in numerous local elections. He never forgot his Irish origins becoming an active member of the Connolly Association.

Bob was always an enthusiastic seller of the Daily Worker and later the Morning Star as well as the Connolly Association’s paper Irish Democrat or the Irish republican paper An Phoblacht. 

I well remember Bob on marches and demonstrations with a huge sheaf of Morning Stars cradled in one arm and an equally huge stack of Irish Democrats in the other. He spoke regularly at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, and in Harlesden and Kilburn.

There were few working-class campaigns in which Bob wasn’t to the fore. He spoke and marched in support of miners, dockers and steelworkers, against the poll tax and defending NHS workers.

At the age of 77 Bob made an award-winning film for the BBC. For the film, Video Diaries — Rebel without a Pause, Bob travelled back to Spain, even visiting the site of the concentration camp where he had been imprisoned.  

Characteristically he used the filming and his visit to Spain to lobby the Spanish authorities for a memorial to pay tribute to those who died, many of them his comrades, in the civil war.

Much later in life Bob discovered the health benefits of marijuana and grew cannabis plants at home for his own use. 

He was regularly heard arguing for legalisation on London radio stations. 

Thieves brought an end to his illicit growing. “My plants all got nicked,” he told me, “and I dare not go to the police about it.”  

Bob Doyle died in 2009 aged 92. Before his death, he published a book of his experiences in the Spanish civil war called Brigadista: An Irishman’s Fight Against Fascism.

The book tells something of the life of a man who packed so much work for his beloved working class into 92 years of struggle. 

Salud! Bob, we will remember you.