Obituary: Jack Gaster

The solicitor, long-time Haldane Society activist, and one of our Vice-Presidents, Jack Gaster, died aged 99, on 12th March.

Jack was one of 13 children of Moses Gaster, Chief Rabbi of the Sephardic Jewish community in England but did not share his father’s Zionist politics. He was an active left-winger for the whole of his life. His recorded memories of the 1926 General Strike, in which he denounces the involvement of university students, including his own brother, as “blacklegs” driving – or rather trying to drive – trains for the Government, have been published by the British Library sound archive.

He first joined the Independent Labour Party and was its representative in 1934 on the committee to welcome the Jarrow hunger marchers. In 1935, a section of the ILP including Gaster joined the Communist Party and that became his political home until its collapse in 1991.

From the 1930s, he was active in the struggle against fascism, organising against Mosley’s blackshirts. He set up his own solicitors’ firm in 1938, specialising in trade union and anti-fascist issues, and married a fellow- Communist, Marie Lynd (died 1990). He served in the war from 1941 (after the Nazi-Soviet pact had ended). In 1945 he acted as election agent for Communist candidates in the general election and in 1946 was elected as a Communist in Mile End to the London County Council. He and fellow Communist Councillor, Ted Bramley, provided the opposition to the ruling Labour Party, concentrating on housing, health and public transport issues.

In 1946, he helped to draft the Communist Party’s submission to the Anglo-American Committee appointed by Clem Attlee to consider the future of Palestine. The submission called for an independent Palestine with Jews forming a national minority with full citizenship rights. “Given this basis, there will be no hesitation on the part of the Arabs, on the basis of agreement with the Jews as equal citizens of Palestine, to admit refugees from fascist persecution as freely as other free countries admit refugees to their shores.”

The Committee did not agree and Gaster berated the British and US governments for their immigration controls on Jewish refugees.

Gaster achieved notoriety in 1952 when, representing the Haldane Society as part of an eightmember delegation from the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, he visited North Korea to investigate claims that the United States had used germ warfare; while there he visited British troops in prisoner- of-war camps. He returned with what he called “the preliminary material for another Nuremberg” and published a 38- page dossier, Korea… I Saw the Truth, indicting Washington for germ warfare, executions without trial, burning alive, torture and organised destruction. The national media denounced him, and Tory MPs pressed for his prosecution for treason. It was only in later years that he was vindicated and it became acknowledged that germ warfare had been used by the US.

His firm, Gaster and Turner, represented London dockworkers in 1951, prosecuted for conspiracy charges around an industrial dispute. Until his retirement in 1990, his firm was the first port of call for trade unionists engaged in industrial disputes. Described as “a very sharp legal mind” he built a civil rights practice, acting for tenants, demonstrators, and serving as legal adviser to the Communist Party, various embassies, and international solidarity movements. Joe Slovo, the South African Communist leader, and Tariq Ali were among his clients.

He maintained an interest in the NHS, serving on a series of hospital management committees and helping to establish the pioneering Caversham Health Centre in north London, and was a prominent supporter of the freedom movements of the Portugese colonies in Africa: Angola and Mozambique.

In the late 1980s, the Communist Party of Great Britain was riven by internal divisions. Gaster wrote an open letter to the General Secretary calling for “a spirit of conciliation and not confrontation”. His words went unheeded and the Party collapsed in 1991. He described the Euro-Communists, whose right-wing trajectory helped to lay the foundations for New Labour, as “pseudo-popular democratic traitors”. Although Gaster did not join the new Communist Party of Britain, he remained a strong supporter of the Party’s newspaper, the Morning Star, and denounced New Labour until the end of his days.

After 1991, he joined Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, twice, leaving it twice, and in later years concentrated his political activities in the Camden Pensioners’ Association and the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies (SCRSS).

Bill Bowring, fellow Haldane and SCRSS activist, recalls: “I went to his 90th birthday party at Hampstead Town Hall, which was attended by senior lawyers, including Lord Justice Stephen Sedley and Sir Geoffrey Goodman, as well as writers and politicians. Still active in his 90s, Jack began to help the pensioners’ movement and would attend rallies in Trafalgar Square, catching the 24 bus near his home.”

The Society was honoured to count Jack Gaster as one of our most loyal and active supporters, and elected him one of our Vice- Presidents, a position which he held until his death. We send our condolences to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Liz Davies

This article can be found in the print edition of Socialist Lawyer number 46, April 2007.