DENNIS BURCHAM, printer, building worker, trade unionist and lifelong friend of the Daily Worker and Morning Star, has died aged 82. His health had been in decline since suffering a stroke some years ago. 

I can’t remember when I first encountered Dennis, but it would have been in the mid ’70s, in a Ucatt or Communist Party meeting, or maybe it was on a march.

Dennis was passionate about his trade unionism and his politics. He hated injustice, he marched against racism, he marched against war and he marched for socialism.

It was only years after meeting Dennis that I found out what had first lit his political fuse.

He was a national serviceman in the 1950s and was sent as a raw, working-class conscript to Cyprus, still a British colony and where, in common with other parts of the British empire, people were demanding the right to determine their own future. 

The British state’s response was one of brutality — often against communists and other anti-fascists who had so recently been fighting Nazis.

Dennis recounted one particular incident in which his own patrol had burst into the home of a terrified working-class Cypriot family, looking for communists and others demonised as seditious terrorists. 

He recalled that there was little furniture in the house, but they had a picture of Lenin over the door. 

This episode affected Dennis deeply — he felt a huge sense of responsibility, which never left him — and he knew that he had far more in common with that family and ordinary Cypriots than with those who had sent him there to police the empire.

When Dennis returned to Britain he became active as a trade unionist and a member of the Communist Party — and that’s how I came to meet him, and his equally militant wife Pat, and their children and later their small army of grandchildren.

After visiting the Soviet Union in the 1980s, he returned with a beautifully painted portrait of Lenin — which took pride of place over his living room door.

Dennis Burcham, June 15 1938 - October 28 2020, will be cremated at the City of London Crematorium, E12 5DQ, at 12.30pm on Thursday November 26.