Category: Politicians Page 1 of 2

In the mid-seventies I travelled twice on the Road of Brotherhood and Unity. Otherwise known as the Autoput, this was the inland route across Yugoslavia, stretching 734 miles along the backbone of the country from the Austrian border at Jesenice in Slovenia to the Greek border at Gevgelija in North Macedonia. Construction of the road, much of it carried out by volunteer youth brigades, had been initiated by Tito in 1947 to connect the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and North Macedonia not just physically but also culturally, as a symbol of the unity of the different ethnic groups.

Despite being heavily used, the road remained a two-lane highway with no central reservation and was in poor condition. Much of the traffic was in a similar state. Alongside the lorries, ramshackle coaches and ancient cars carried young travellers on limited budgets from northern and western Europe to Greece and Turkey, and in the opposite direction ferried Turkish, Greek and Yugoslavian Gastarbeiter to West Germany.

The journey was long, and there were few facilities along the way. In summer it was hot, vehicles lacked air conditioning and mosquitoes feasted on exposed flesh. Unroadworthy vehicles broke down and blocked the highway. Eager to put the Autoput behind them drivers went without sleep or breaks for dangerously prolonged periods, and accidents were common. Carcasses of wrecked and burnt-out cars lay in the fields. Those cars which had decent acceleration raced past the others, overtaking using the opposite lane whenever an opportunity arose on the crowded road.

My first experience of the highway was in one of those recklessly accelerating cars, the second time I was on the Magic Bus, travelling from London to Athens. Like every passenger who made that journey I remember two drivers who performed an elaborately choreographed manoeuvre as they periodically changed places while the bus was still moving. The trip was meant to take three days, carrying our food with us and sleeping on the coach, but strikes and a fuel distribution issue left us stranded at a petrol station somewhere in Yugoslavia, sitting by the roadside for an additional half day. For the rest of the journey the drivers tried to make up the lost time.

Yet despite the sweat, the dirt and the discomfort, what I remember most is the camaraderie on the bus and the romance of the road as we journeyed through what still seemed a rather exotic country, the land where the Partisans defied fascism with their ideals of brotherhood and unity.

That road is easier to travel today: in 2019 a four-lane national motorway was completed. But it is no longer called the Road of Brotherhood and Unity, and it no longer crosses one united country. Instead, it is called the A2 in Slovenia, the A3 in Croatia, the A3 and the A1 in Serbia and the A1 in North Macedonia. Even more prosaically it goes by its European designations forming parts of the E62, E70 and E75, respectively. For Yugoslavia fell apart, collapsing into inter-ethnic wars in the 1990s.

Yugoslavia, the Kingdom of South Slavs, had emerged following the collapse of Austria-Hungary in World War I. The highly centralised state came under the control of the Serbian monarchy which enjoyed considerable leverage having supported the Allies in the war and on account of its military strength. The non-Serbian nations suffered two decades of marginalisation and discrimination.

When the Nazi Germany, assisted by Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded and occupied Yugoslavia in 1941, the king and government fled. The Axis powers exploited warped nationalism to establish puppet governments, the fascist Ustase in Croatia and Bosnia and the royalist para-fascist Chetniks in Serbia.

But in that occupied, divide land something remarkable occurred. The Yugoslav Communist Party which had been outlawed since 1920, able only to operate an underground network, emerged from obscurity. A party with only 12,000 members in 1941 created the most formidable anti-fascist force in Europe: the Partisans. Committed to the liberation of Yugoslavia and the establishment of a communist state which treated all ethnic groups equally, the Partisans liberated their country virtually unaided by the Allies or Russia.

In marked contrast to the collaborators, they adopted the slogan Brotherhood and Unity. The partisan brigades included Serbs, Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians, Bosnians, and Kosovan Albanians; there were Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians, Muslims, Jews and Atheists; there were men and women, for the partisan ideals also included women’s rights and gender equality. From their strategic heartlands in the mountainous regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro, spreading to Croatia and Slovenia, the multi-ethnic partisans fought the invaders and collaborators. The most effective resistance movement in occupied Europe, they forced a German retreat and took back power in Yugoslavia.

The same idealism informed the post war organisation of the country. Elections led to the victory of the Communist Party, the king was deposed, and a federal republic established. Brotherhood and Unity remained the guiding principle: poor nations were to have the same rights as middle-income ones; everyone was free to express their own culture but expected to be tolerant of others. A country previously susceptible to ultra nationalism was to be united around a common Yugoslav goal.

Moreover, Yugoslavia pursued a successful policy of Non-Alignment, exploiting east west antagonism to her own advantage. Economic reforms introduced a unique, decentralised form of market socialism, with worker self-management.

There was economic growth; the spread of literacy and education; health care improved. Women were encouraged to work; abortion and contraception were legal.

Yugoslav citizens could travel and work abroad. Foreigners could travel freely within the country, and from the 1960s they were not just passing through Yugoslavia on the Autoput but holidaying on the Adriatic coast and islands.

Yet in the last decade of the twentieth century Yugoslavia fractured and collapsed into violent and brutal wars.

Economic crises drove the breakup: inflation, unemployment and foreign debt pushed Yugoslavia into recession in the late 1980s. Strikes, and the uncovering of corruption followed. Resentment grew in the wealthier republics of Croatia and Slovenia whose populations felt they were paying too much into the federal budget to support the poorer territories.

The fall of Communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union meant that western powers no longer had a motive to help Yugoslavia with its debts. The IMF imposed austerity measures. And without support from the Communist bloc the power of the Yugoslav Communist Party to hold the federation together was weakened.

Against this background atavistic national, cultural and religious divisions re-emerged.

The reformed 1974 Constitution had given the republics more autonomy, reducing the power of central government where Serbia had continued to hold a dominant position. It was a dominance which some Serbs did not wish to surrender. When the constituent republics went further and sought to secede inter-ethnic wars resulted.

Slovenia voted for complete independence in 1990, followed by Croatia a year later. The Serb controlled Yugoslav People’s Army moved against them, supported in Croatia by the Serb minority there who had a legitimate fear of Tudjman’s openly anti-Serb nationalist government. The Croatians had an equally reasonable suspicion that desire for a Greater Serbia rather than a federal Yugoslavia dominated Milosevic’s thinking. The war lasted four years during which Serbs shelled civilian areas of Split and Dubrovnik, and their paramilitaries were responsible for the Vukovar hospital massacre.

In 1992 Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence. The Serb response was to declare a separate Republic of Serb people, the Republica Srpska, within Bosnia-Herzegovina. From this base between 1992-95 Serbs under Radovan Karadzic conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing, massacring and raping Muslim Bosniaks. They laid siege to Sarajevo, bombarding it for four years. At Srebrenica they murdered 8,000 men and boys, an act declared genocide by the International Court.

The Kosovan Albanians, who made up 77% of the population of Kosovo, had since the 1980s been demanding that the Serbian province of Kosovo should be a full constituent republic. As these demands increased in the 1990s, Milosevic responded with an aggressive Serbian nationalist agenda: there were growing restrictions on use of the Albanian language; Albanian media were silenced and schools were closed; and Albanians were dismissed from public office. When the newly formed Kosovan Liberation Army conducted acts of sabotage against the Serbian security forces retribution was brutal. Two thousand civilian and KLM combatants were killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced between1998-99. A United Nations Supreme Court found that there had been a systematic campaign of terror including murder and rape conducted against the Albanian population.

Economic factors, the fall of Communism and the rise of nationalism ripped Yugoslavia apart and the subsequent wars left 140,000 dead, 130,000 casualties, 2.4 million refugees and an ugly record of war crimes, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. A long way from the Brotherhood and Unity ideals of the partisans, a long way from the carefree days when the Magic Bus bumped and trundled along the Brotherhood and Unity Highway.

And perhaps there was one more factor contributing to the collapse of Yugoslavia. For without subscribing to the great men theory of history, it is impossible to deny that Josip Broz Tito was a major unifying force in Yugoslavia and that ethnic tensions started to grow after his death in 1980.

Tito was born in 1892 in present day Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a young man he was active in the Metal Workers Union. In 1913 he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army for compulsory military service. Captured by the Russians during World War I, he became a prisoner of war but escaped and after the October Revolution joined a Red Guard unit in Omsk. In 1920 he returned home and joined the Communist Party in the newly formed Yugoslavia.

After the CPY was declared illegal in 1921, he continued to work for the party, was arrested and lost his job. He became a professional revolutionary, writing and organising strikes, and as a result was imprisoned. In 1934 he was elected to the Politburo and became a full time official of the Comintern while continuing to organise strikes in the shipyards. After recruiting volunteers for the International Brigades in Spain in 1936, he became General Secretary of the CPY.

When the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia, it was Tito who called on people to unite against the occupation. As Commander in Chief of the Yugoslav Partisans, he organised and directed them, and personally commanded brigades in Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia.

After the war Tito served as Prime Minister (1943-63) and President of Yugoslavia (1953-1980). Despite Yugoslavia being a founder member of the Cominform Tito became the only leader during Stalin’s lifetime to defy Soviet hegemony leading to the Tito-Stalin split and Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the organisation in 1948. Assassination attempts organised by Stalin,

I will shake my little finger and there will be no more Tito,

all failed. Tito wrote to the Soviet leader,

Stalin. Stop sending assassins to murder me. We have already caught five, one with a bomb, another with a rifle… if this does not stop, I will send one man to Moscow and there will be no need to send another.

Tito was a founding member, and the first Secretary General in 1961, of the Non-Aligned Movement.In addition to establishing useful ties with developing countries, his policy enabled Yugoslavia to receive aid from America and, after Stalin’s death, from the Comecon as well.

Justifiably, the political, economic, and foreign policies of post war Yugoslavia– independence from Moscow, workers self-management, market socialism, foreign policy neutrality, federalism and unity – were collectively known as Titoism, and his death removed a powerful influence for overcoming divisions and holding the republics of Yugoslavia together.

Although the wars have ended, the revival of nationalism has rendered Tito a polarising figure across the countries which once made up Yugoslavia. The complex where he was buried was closed to the public during the wars. It has since reopened but it no longer has a twenty-four-hour guard of honour.

Tito was buried, as he wished, in the House of Flowers: a winter garden which he had built near his home in Belgrade, and where he had an office looking out over the city.

The river boat down the Danube docks in Belgrade, and while my fellow tourists headed for the fortress, Saint Sava, and the Tesla museum, I visited Tito.

Tito’s tomb in the House of Flowers, Belgrade

Tito’s third wife, Jovanka, lies in a smaller tomb alongside.

It was a sad visit, for it was not just Tito’s grave, but that of Yugoslavia and of all the fine hopes of the brave Partisans.

Grigoris Lambrakis – Zei

By Gravedigger

On May 3, 2026

In Activists, Medics, Politicians

The Old Theatre lay at the heart of the LSE: forum for the larger undergraduate lectures, arena for visiting speakers, and stage for febrile student union meetings. But on Thursday evenings politics ceded ground to culture when Film Soc. screened its weekly offering. And it was there, with singular surprise, that I first encountered applause in response to a film. In the provinces of my childhood, we had always hastened to exit the cinema before the credits rolled to avoid the then ubiquitous playing of the National Anthem. Free from that constraint a more leisurely exit prevailed but I had never witnessed an audience remaining seated, engaged in prolonged clapping long after the screen went blank.

The plaudits came from a group seated together near the front of the theatre. “It’s the Greek students,” my companion apprised me. It was 1970 and the film was Costa-Gavras’ “Z,”released the previous year.

“Z” began with an arresting content warning: in lieu of the habitual disclaimer, it informed the audience,

Toute resemblance avec des evenements reels, des personnes mortes ou vivantes n’est pas le fait du hazard,

And in case this lacked sufficient clarity it confirmed the intentional similarity to real events with determined capitalization,

Elle est VOLONTAIRE.

The film was based on the political novel of the same name by Vassilis Vassilikos published in 1967, an account of the murder of Grigoris Lambrakis and the subsequent investigation into his assassination.

Grigoris Lambrakis (1912-1963) was born in Kerasitsa, a village in the Peloponnese, and studied medicine in Athens. He was a champion athlete, holding the Greek record for long jump for twenty-three years, winning gold medals in the Balkan Games, and participating in the controversial 1936 Olympic Games.

During the Axis occupation of Greece, 1941-44, he worked in his brother’s clinic where they sheltered partisans and supplied them with false identities. During the famine of those years, he set up the Union of Greek Athletes who held competitions to raise money to fund food banks for the starving population.

Throughout the Civil War years which followed the withdrawal of the Axis powers Lambrakis treated the wounded on both sides of the conflict. For this he was accused of “anti-national activity” by the conservative, monarchist government and spent six months in the Goudi prison in 1948.

During the 1950s while specialising in gynaecology and endocrinology, Lambrakis operated a free weekly clinic for patients unable to afford medical care.

So far, a clever, talented, decent man living his life and doing what good he could along the way, principled and with a certain courage. Then in the 1960s came a significant shift in focus: Lambrakis became committed to radical social and political change.

Something had been rotten in the state of Greece since the mid-1930s: an unpleasant amalgam of domestic dictatorships and foreign oppression. In 1935 the monarchy had been restored by a rigged plebiscite. George II then facilitated the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas. Between 1941 and 1944 the Axis occupation, the collaborationist government under Rallis, and the British blockade reduced the country to starvation. More than 200,000 people died in the famine.

In 1944 it was understood that the Communist EAM/ELAS, whose members had been at the heart of national resistance against the occupying powers of Nazi Germany and Bulgaria, would be given a significant voice in the new government, and that the collaborationist Security Battalions would be put on trial. This did not happen. Instead, Churchill, who combined hysterical anti-Communism with a crazed desire for British hegemony, sent troops under General Scobie to escort the Greek government in exile home from Egypt.

Back in Athens, Scobie ordered the EAM/ELAS forces to disarm, while supplying the anti-Communists with ammunition. A mass protest in central Athens was met with police opening fire and in a savage assault killing twenty-eight people. The Battle for Athens, thirty-seven days of fighting, ensued with the British troops and right-wing nationalists ranged against the Communists. The defeat of the latter when the British flew in extra troops was followed by the White Terror of 1945-6 with arrests, torture, exile and murder of leftists. The Greek Civil War continued until 1949 with an estimated 150,000 dead.

Throughout the 1950s, repressive right-wing regimes were funded and supported by America, where a morbid fear of Communism ran even deeper than in Britain. These successive governments connived with the extravagantly funded monarchy to maintain a stranglehold on the constitution. Former partisans and dissidents were sent to re-education camps on remote islands; censorship was rife; the power of trade unions was limited and trade unionists imprisoned; the power of the army and police went unchecked.

Against this background Lambrakis stood for the Hellenic Parliament in 1961 as an Independent member for Piraeus under the umbrella of the United Democratic Left (EDA), the only legal left-wing organisation since the civil war. His platform was one of peace and democracy, his aim to eliminate all trace of fascism at home and to free Greece from the foreign presence supporting it.

In his pre-election address he told his audience,

Dear friends we are running for election with two pursuits: peace and democracy. We want peace so that no missile bases will be established on Greek soil and we can have friendly relations with our Balkan neighbours. We want real democracy… to put an end to arrests, forced exile…and to have the most beautiful achievement of the Greek people finally recognised: our heroic national resistance against Italian and German fascists and their local collaborators.

Lambrakis opposed Greek involvement with NATO and reliance on American economic aid, sought to close the US missile base near Thessaloniki, and fought the establishment of nuclear bases in Crete. He established the Committee for International Détente and Peace in Greece and attended international pacifist meetings and demonstrations.

In April 1963 he joined the march organised by CND from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Aldermaston to London. The Bertrand Russell Youth Committee for Nuclear Disarmament led by a law student, Michael Peristerakis, planned another march from Athens to Marathon later that month, differing from the marches in western Europe in that it was a demonstration for social change, democracy, and the right to freedom of expression as well as disarmament. In a perfect, though undoubtedly unintended, illustration of the need for these reforms the Karamanlis government and the police banned the march. Despite a display of intimidation thousands of marchers ignored the official ban; 2,000 were arrested and three hundred injured. Only Lambrakis, claiming his parliamentary immunity, was able to reach Marathon, walking alone holding the same banner he had carried at Aldermaston bearing the nuclear disarmament symbol and the word “Greece.” But when he tried to complete the return march, parliamentary immunity failed him and he too was arrested.

For Lambrakis the battle for the release of political prisoners was part of the same struggle as that for pacifism: peace and civil rights were inexorably linked. Over 1,000 political prisoners arrested at the end of the Civil War remained incarcerated. Antonis Ambatielos, a trades unionist and member of the Greek resistance had been arrested and sentenced to death in 1947, his sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. To draw attention to his case and that of other political prisoners, Lambrakis made a statement to the British press during a visit there by Queen Frederica. Pointing to the undemocratic and unconstitutional interventions of the reactionary queen in parliament and government, and her resistance to the desire of the Greek people for democracy, freedom, and the release of political prisoners, he issued a prescient warning,

I wish to warn the queen that with her attitude she is leading the throne to a sure demise.

The resulting publicity resulted in the cause of the Greek prisoners being taken up by British Labour MPs and an international conference calling for an amnesty of all Greek political prisoners was held in Paris.

In May 1963 Lambrakis attended an anti-war meeting in Thessaloniki despite having received death threats. In full view of a large police and military presence a pickup van drove towards him and a passenger in the back of the truck delivered blows to his head. Five days later he died of his injuries.

Over half a million people attended Lambrakis’ funeral despite attempts by the government to limit the turnout. The letter “Z,” an abbreviation for the Greek “Zei,” He Lives, appeared on buildings and hoardings in Greek cities.

The Investigating Prosecutor, Christos Sartzetakis, was pressured by the government to return a risible false narrative of a traffic accident. He refused, emphasising the culpability of high-ranking police officials, members of the paramilitary and of the repressive para-state apparatus who initiated the attack.

The assassination contributed to the fall of the Karamanlis government, and the electoral victory of Papandreou’s Centre Union in November brought some reforms with the release of political prisoners, wealth redistribution, economic liberalisation and education expansion.

In 1964 a new political organisation, the Lambrakis Democratic Youth, was formed with Lambrakis’ friend Theodorakis as its first president.

Yet change was limited, and after King Constantine engineered a split in the Centre Union Papandreou resigned heralding political instability, and a series of short-term weak governments. Nonetheless in the elections scheduled for May 1967 the Centre Union confidently expected to emerge as the largest party and to be able to rule in coalition with the United Democratic Left. But precisely four years after Lambrakis’ march to Marathon, on April 21^st, 1967, the military Junta seized power claiming instability (nothing new) and the threat of an anarcho-Communist takeover (from the Centre Union?) as justification… Both the monarchy and the CIA have always denied that they lent their support to the coup.

Leading politicians and political activists were arrested, the constitution suspended and martial law declared. Political opponents were imprisoned and tortured. Amnesty International estimated that over 10,000 people were arrested and imprisoned within the first few days of the regime, and six months on more than 2,000 had been subject to torture. Political parties were suppressed, military courts established, civil liberties collapsed, freedom of assembly outlawed, surveillance introduced, the press censored.

The Investigating Prosecutor who had identified the agents responsible for Lambrakis’ death found himself in prison, while all charges against the perpetrators were dropped. Against this background Vassilis Vassilikos published “Z.” It was promptly banned in Greece as was the subsequent film with soundtrack by Theodorakis who was exiled. Even possession of Lambrakis’ scientific papers became an offence.

At the end of the film before the credits there is a list of some of the things banned by the Junta, they include: long hair for men, miniskirts, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Chekov, Pinter, new maths, the peace symbol, Sociology, the letter “Z.” The absurdity amused us, but must have appeared less than humorous to the Greek students.

The Junta fell in 1974 under the impact of internal splits, student protests, and the ill-fated attempt to invade Cyprus. The country transitioned by free vote to a Presidential Parliamentary democracy, the Hellenic Republic, with an independent judiciary, press and trade unions.

Since 1982 the Athens Classic Marathon has been dedicated to Grigoris Lambrakis.

Grave of Lambrakis, the First Cemetery, Athens

The quotation on the grave is from Yiannis Ritsos, Poet, Communist, and Member of the Greek Resistance.

Ritsos’ poem Epitaphios was inspired by the photograph of a mother weeping over the body of her son who died when police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration of striking tobacco workers in Thessaloniki in 1936.The poem was publicly burned during the Metaxas dictatorship. Theodorakis set it to music. It was sung in the streets following Lambrakis’ funeral. Ritsos was sent to a prison camp by the Junta.
(Photograph from a Greek newspaper, Rizospastis, May 10 1936 unknown author).

The bronze on Lambrakis’ grave portrays a dove of peace, Lambrakis bearing his CND banner on his march to Marathon, and his profile. There is a famous photograph of him with the banner. It is copyright but you can see it on Wikipedia if you google Lambrakis.

Alfred and Ada Salter: Political Triumph and Personal Tragedy

By Gravedigger

On March 22, 2026

In Medics, Politicians

I am fond of Rotherhithe; it is a comfortable walking distance from Tower Bridge but just far enough east to discourage most tourists… apart from those who congregate at the Mayflower Inn from where a grumpy bunch of Protestant separatists may have sailed in 1620.

There is the little Brunel Museum located in the engine house designed by Marc Isambard Brunel as part of the infrastructure of the Thames Tunnel; the scant remains of Edward III’s Manor House; a few cobbled streets around St. Mary’s church, and somewhere in the graveyard the remains of Christopher Jones, the ship’s master on the Mayflower; St. Mary’s Free School, established 1613 to educate the children of impoverished seafarers, and bearing two statues of the charity children in their blue uniforms; and a Swedish, a Norwegian and a Finnish church.

Memorial to Christopher Jones, Saint Mary’s churchyard, Rotherhithe. The Saint Christopher figure looks back to the old world, and the child forward to the new.

Saint Mary’s Free School, now a private house

Figures of charity children in their blue uniforms

Otherwise, Rotherhithe today is a comfortably ordinary sort of place, its massive docks and wharfs long gone, but I envy those who live in the warehouse conversions along the river and drink in the Angel, a cosy 1830s pub built out over the Thames on wooden posts. From its balcony there are stunning views upriver to Tower Bridge and the jostling skyscrapers of the City.

The Angel marks the boundary between Rotherhithe and Bermondsey, both part of the Metropolitan Borough of Bermondsey between 1900-1965. In an open space beside the pub is one of my favourite memorials: Dr. Salter’s Daydream.

Alfred Salter (1873-1945) entered Guy’s Hospital Medical School on a scholarship at the age of sixteen. He garnered prizes, first class honours, and gold medals. With his star burning so brightly, it was expected that he would assume a Harley Street practice, a consultancy, or a prestigious research post; Lister had invited him to join the British Institute of Preventative Medicine.

But during his time at Guy’s, Salter had become familiar with Bermondsey and Rotherhithe. I would not have envied the inhabitants in those days. Alongside the docks and the factories processing leather and hides, Salter visited courtyards where one water closet and one standpipe, operating for only two hours per day, served twenty-five houses. The dwellings were damp and cramped, with verminous walls, their occupants half starved. Jacob’s Island, made notorious by Dickens in Oliver Twist, lay in Bermondsey. Salter decided that this was where he would work.

He went to live in the Bermondsey Settlement which provided health and education services for one of the worst slums in London. Fenner Brockway, in his biography of Salter, describes a romantic figure bursting with life and energy, “known as the Settlement firebrand – militant Republican, militant Socialist, militant Agnostic, militant Teetotaller, militant Pacifist.” In these years Salter was also a member of an international organisation which assisted political refugees, Anarchists and Socialists fleeing oppressive regimes, and landing clandestinely from incoming ships at Rotherhithe docks.

At the Settlement, Salter met and married Ada Brown (1866-1942), a social worker. They bought a house in Jamaica Road in Rotherhithe where they lived above his surgery. Under Ada’s influence the former militant agnostic joined the Society of Friends, whose values accorded with the pacifist and ethical socialist beliefs which he and Ada shared.

Salter, who became known as “the poor man’s doctor” began by charging 6d for consultations but waived his fee if people were unable to pay, which did not endear him to fellow GPs. Later he introduced a mutual health insurance scheme in Bermondsey, described as “an NHS before the NHS.” He placed great emphasis on preventative medicine and education, promoting health centres and showing health propaganda films. His practice grew, and he took on four partners who shared his principles and worked on a co-operative basis.

In 1903 Salter was elected to the Borough Council and in 1922 he stood for Parliament as an Independent Labour (ILP) candidate. Having expounded the ideals of socialism, in his closing speech on the eve of the poll he told the electorate:

If you want a member of parliament who will vote for cheaper beer, you will elect one of the other candidates. If you want a member of parliament who will vote for an army and navy to defend Britain and the Empire, you will elect one of the other candidates… I will vote for prohibition. I will vote against all credits for the armed forces.

Most of his audience were drinkers and most of the men had served in the forces during World War I. His agent, horrified and fearing he was losing votes with every word, phoned the committee room begging them to send an urgent message calling the doctor to a life and death case.

Yet when the results came in next day, Dr. Salter had won and West Bermondsey had been captured for Socialism. In his maiden speech Salter introduced a motion in favour of a minimum living wage for all workers and condemned the fabulous dividends paid to shareholders. With a rare literary flourish he quoted Russell Lowell,

Have ye founded your thrones and altars then,

On the bodies and souls of living men,

And think ye that building shall endure,

Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?

In his constituency Salter worked for better housing, free school meals, nursery schools, and playgrounds, recognising that these were as essential as medicines in improving public health. He understood that improvements in nutrition and the environment were vital to bring down deaths from tuberculosis. Under his guidance the council encouraged the use of tuberculin tested milk; the first municipal solarium in Britain was established to prevent and treat not just TB but also rickets and skin diseases; swimming pools, public baths and wash houses were built.

Salter himself bought Fairby Grange, an old mansion in Kent with twenty acres of grounds, and presented it to the Council to serve as the first convalescent home in Britain.

In 1929 he resigned his medical practice believing it was more important to focus on his political work removing the causes of sickness through help for the unemployed, adequate pensions, and recreational facilities.

Meanwhile Ada Salter had been elected as Mayor by the Borough Council, and the Labour majority replaced the union jack over the town hall with a red flag bearing the borough arms, fulfilling a prediction – “The red flag shall fly over the town hall” – which Ada had made when she was the only Socialist among fifty-six councillors. Ada also declined to wear the mayoral robes and chain of office. The Tory press was scandalised. But these were symbolic gestures, and she was soon introducing changes of greater social significance.

Campaigns against air pollution, pushing for the establishment of a green belt and promoting urban gardening, were at the heart of her work. Over two years nine thousand trees were planted in the borough. Thousands of cuttings from flowering plants at Fairby Grange were transported for summer bedding. Old gravestones were move to the walls of churchyards and the graves covered with flowers. Public buildings and lampposts were adorned with window boxes and hanging baskets. Bulbs, seeds and seedlings from Fairby were given to anyone in the borough with space to plant. In Southwark Park, which had been little more than a stark open space, flowerbeds and benches were laid out specifically with the elderly and mothers with young children in mind.

Both Salters dreamed of turning Bermondsey into a Garden Village. In Wilson Grove back-to-back slum dwellings were replaced with council owned cottages with gardens, drawing admiration at home and abroad. But a change in national government in 1924, and problems of space for rehousing the dense population, meant that elsewhere in the borough blocks of flats replaced the slums. Yet under the Labour Council gardens were built around the flats and tenants encouraged to grow plants on their balconies.

It was not easy. Fenner Brockway wrote:

For two years the planting of flowers was a complete failure. The children trampled on them and tore them up…the Housing Committee was coming to the conclusion that the gardens would have to be replaced by concrete yards. Then in the third year a daffodil broke through the earth –and the children were taught to guard it as though it were a fairy. The victory of the flowers was won. Adults and children now take pride in them.

The Salters had always been pacifists: both worked with the No Conscription Fellowship in World War One, and Alfred’s 1914 pamphlet Faith of a Pacifist had been translated and clandestinely distributed in Germany. In the 1930s he had spoken out in Parliament against arms sales and profiteering from war preparations. Both he and Ada worked for the Peace Pledge Union. He opposed the bombing of civilian areas in Germany despite the damage inflicted by the Luftwaffe in his own constituency. His last speech in Parliament in 1942 was a plea for peace reasoning that it was a terrible fallacy that ends justify means:

We cannot believe that any new or righteous order of society will be achieved by evil means, by overcoming evil with greater, more potent and more effective evil

His last political act was to join a two day fast to draw public attention to famine and starvation in Greece; under the combined impact of the Nazi occupation and the British naval blockade 30,000 people had died in the winter of 1941-42. Churchill’s government reluctantly lifted the blockade in February 1942.

The Salters chose cremation and have no gravestones. In 1949 Fenner Brockway wrote that the Borough of Bermondsey, despite its war time devastation, was Salter’s monument.

But Dr. Salter’s Daydream, the bronze memorial beside the Thames, remembers not just Alfred and Ada Salter’s medical and political achievements, but their private tragedy. For they had a daughter, Joyce. Unlike other middle-class parents, they did not send her to a boarding school outside the borough, for they did not believe that any child should have privileges denied to others. She attended a local school and made friends with local children. Her parents reserved a room in their home for Joyce and her friends. There everything was washable, and the toys and furniture regularly disinfected. Nonetheless when she was eight years old Joyce caught scarlet fever for the third time.

The Salters did not draw their blinds as was customary following a death. “She was our sunshine,” said Ada. “Why should we shut out sunshine?” Joyce’s portrait hung in their study, and to the end of her life Ada decorated it with flowers every day.

Portrait of Joyce with her father.
Image source: wikimedia creative commons, licensed under CC by 4.0 international license

Dr. Salter’s Daydream, bronze designed by Diane Gorvin, 1991.
Dr. Salter, remembering happy times with his daughter, looks towards the Thames, where Joyce leans against the wall.

Ada Salter with her gardening spade, her left hand is designed to hold the flowers which are often left for her.

As can be seen from the photograph above, Joyce was a beautiful child. Unfortunately the bronze of her is not so successful as those of her parents.

Joyce’s cat poised on the wall above her. In the background Tower Bridge, and modern skyscrapers in The City.

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The information reproduced here about the work of Alfred and Ada Salter comes largely from Fenner Brockway, Bermondsey Story, the life of Alfred Salter, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1949.

Bookcover by Arthur Wragg. Dr. Salter always cycled to Parliament on the old bicycle illustrated here.

Lynn Morris of the Journeyman Theatre wrote and performed Red Flag over Bermondsey about the life of Ada Salter in 2016.

Myles Hobart, Parliamentarian: a Moment of Glory eclipsed by a Runaway Coach

By Gravedigger

On August 31, 2025

In Politicians, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

Myles Hobart was the Member of Parliament for Marlow in Buckinghamshire for a very short time:1628-29.

I love seventeenth century history, not least because at this time the English language reached its apogee, so that every Act of Parliament, every Petition and Protest, is couched in the most eloquent and elegant English, as much a work of lucid literature, as a dry document. But in the seventeenth century the business of Parliament never was dull or mundane. On the contrary, acts of high drama were leading slowly but inexorably to the demise of absolute monarchy and the genesis of a Parliamentary democracy. Myles Hobart had a walk on part in one such drama.

Charles I, like his father, had an elevated view of his status as God’s chosen appointee. He ran an extravagant household, had a bloated army…and expected other people to pay for his amusements. In 1626 Parliament refused to grant the taxes he sought. Charles promptly dissolved Parliament and raised money through forced loans, imprisoning without trial those who refused him. Billeting his soldiers in private homes, he obliged people to feed, clothe and accommodate them.

But as increasing numbers of people faced prison rather than “lending” him money, he was compelled to call another Parliament in 1628. The Members were ready for him. Edward Coke had drawn up the Petition of Right confirming that there should be no taxation without Parliamentary consent, no imprisonment without trial, and no forced quartering of soldiers in private houses. As a condition of their voting taxes Parliament demanded the King’s formal assent to the Petition.

Charles attempted to fob them off with a verbal consent. The Parliamentarians were not impressed; they sought written guarantees:

Not that I distrust the King but that I cannot take his trust but in a Parliamentary way,

observed Edward Coke wryly.

Charles then tried to add a proviso stating that the terms of the Petition prevailed through his grace, and not as of right, hoping through this expedient that in future disputes the Petition would have no force of law. But Parliament was packed with men who had legal training, they knew the power of words, and they stood firm. Reluctantly Charles gave his formal assent to the Petition in June 1628.

But he then prorogued parliament, and had the Petition of Right rewritten so that it could only be enforced “according to the laws and customs of the realm,” a loose phrase which he could interpret to suit himself. He proceeded to collect the indirect taxes of Tunnage and Poundage* without seeking authorisation and to prosecute merchants who refused to pay.

When Parliament reconvened in January 1629 and took issue with this illegal levy, the Members anticipated that another adjournment would presage a dissolution. As they expected, in March, on instructions from the King, the Speaker rose to announce an adjournment. Immediately Denzil Holles and Benjamin Valentine pushed him back into his chair and held him down ** while a furious debate ensued as angry members defied the king and his supporters in the House. John Eliot thundered,

Mr. Speaker there never was the like of this done in the House…It is the fundamental liberty of this House that we have ever used to adjourn ourselves.

When the King sent his messenger, the ludicrously named Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, to order Parliament to disperse, Myles Hobart had his moment of glory: he locked the door and pocketed the key leaving an impotent Black Rod standing outside. John Eliot then read out the declaration which he had prepared. After condemning Charles’ actions, he sought and secured assent for the Three Resolutions anathematising anyone levying or paying Tonnage and Poundage without the consent of Parliament, or promoting Popery or Arminianism (the religious groups supporting the king). Anyone breaching the Resolutions was declared

a capital enemy of the Kingdom and Commonwealth…betrayer of the liberties of England and an enemy of the state.

In short, such people would be guilty of treason. Having completed their business, the Members then voted for their own adjournment.

Charles’ response was swift. Nine of the leading protagonists, including John Eliot and Myles Hobart were arrested and imprisoned in the Tower.

Some few vipers that did cast the mist of undutifulness over most of their eyes,

spat Charles, inaccurately, for a majority in the House were firmly behind Eliot. As the MPs had foreseen Charles then dissolved Parliament. He ruled as an autocratic, absolute ruler for eleven years raising money by royal prerogative…but he was to get his comeuppance in 1649.

Meanwhile Eliot died in prison. Myles Hobart was released in 1631 but was fatally injured a year later when his carriage overturned on Holborn Hill.

He was buried in All Saints Parish Church, Marlow, where a monument, situated too high up for comfortable viewing, features a bust of Hobart resting on a cushion. An admonitory homily references his youth; he was only thirty-four when he died,

Wryte not a daye this spectacle thee charms,

Death from thy byrth doth claspe thee in her armes.

Youthful as he, thou mayest be, yet he’s gonne

And thou must followe, no man knows how soone

Learn this of hym, prepared thou be to dye

Then shalt thou lyve, though through mortality.”

Memorial, Myles Hobart, All Saints Parish Church, Marlow

The cause of his death is not spelled out but illustrated by the charming carving of a runaway coach.

I was disappointed that despite the monument having been erected by vote of Parliament in 1647 there was no reference to the day Hobart locked Black Rod out of the Commons. But I sent him a silent word of thanks for his theatrical contribution to the long fight for Parliamentary democracy.

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*If you have forgotten your school history, Tunnage and Poundage were respectively the indirect taxes charged on each tun of wine imported and on other goods imported or exported as determined by weight.

**There is a wonderful painting of the incident by Andrew Garrick Gow in the Parliamentary Art Collection see https://artuk.org >discover>artworks>House of Commons 1628-29, Speaker Finch held by Holles and Valentine.

Time to Send the Marbles Home: Melina Mercouri (1920-1994)

By Gravedigger

On January 5, 2025

In Activists, Actors, Politicians

You can almost hear the cicadas. With the vivid cerulean sky and the intense light, the pines and cypresses, there can be no doubt where this grave lies. Here, close to the entrance, in the most prestigious section of The First Cemetery of Athens, lie the wealthier and more known of her citizens. The grave stele by the sculptor Andreas Panagiotakis rises above the tomb of the Merkouris family, prominent politicians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; one name stands out, for her fame eclipses that of her ancestors.

Grave of Melina Mercouri, Athens First Cemetery

The faux Doric Temple behind and above the tomb of the Mekouris family is that of Schliemann (another story)

When the impossibly glamorous, smoky-voiced, Melina Mercouri died in 1994, theatres and cinemas closed. On the day of her state funeral, schools, shops, and government offices followed their example as the cortege, with 300,000 people walking behind, made its way to the cemetery.

After working in Greek theatre in the 1940s and 1950s, Mercouri had established her role in Greek cinema with Stella (1955), a retelling of the Carmen story, but it was with Never on Sunday (1960), written and directed by Jules Dassin, that she sprang to international fame. The story of Ilya, a prostitute in Piraeus, and Homer-Thrace, an American tourist and classical scholar, part romantic comedy, part asseveration of a joyful, carefree epicureanism contrasted with stagnant, patriarchal conformity, won Mercouri best actress at the Cannes Film Festival. Its theme tune by Manos Hadjidakis introduced western audiences to the bouzouki. Never on Sunday is even credited with stimulating the Greek tourist boom of the 1960s.

Mercouri went on to make films in Greece, America, and France, including Phaedra and Topkapi, before returning to a stage career on Broadway and in Greece.

Then in 1967 a right-wing military coup brought the regime of the colonels to power in Greece. For seven years, first under Papadopoulos, then under Ioannidis, the Greek Junta attacked civil liberties, ending freedom of the press, dissolving political parties, prohibiting political demonstrations, producing an index of prohibited songs, music, literature, and films. Ultra nationalistic and deeply anti-Communist, they imprisoned, tortured, and exiled their opponents. Politicised by the coup, Mercouri, who had been working in America, spent those years travelling around the world raising awareness of Greek politics and campaigning for the removal of the junta. The colonels responded by revoking her Greek citizenship and confiscating her property. Her response was succinct:

I was born a Greek, and I will die a Greek. Those bastards were born fascists, and they will die fascists.

Returning to Greece after the fall of the junta, she was a founding member of PASOK, the centre-left, Panhellenic Socialist Movement, which she represented in the Hellenic Parliament from 1977-1994. During the PASOK government of 1981-85 she became the first female Minister for Culture and Sports, and in this capacity introduced the European Capitals of Culture scheme, with Athens the first city so designated in 1985. The scheme raised the image and visibility of the cities involved, celebrating the richness and diversity of European cultures, and in its wake bringing not just cultural and social benefits, but economic benefits too with increased tourism and urban regeneration.

But there are other actors, other activists, other politicians, and Mercouri is most remembered for her battle for the return of the Elgin marbles to Greece.

Between 1801 and 1812 agents acting for Thomas Bruce, 7^th Earl of Elgin, then Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Athens, removed more than half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures, and others from the Erechtheion, the Temple of Athena Nike, and the Propylaea. Elgin took possession of twenty-one statues, fifteen metope panels, and seventy-five metres of Parthenon frieze. To facilitate their carriage from Ottoman Greece to his private museum in Britain, the metopes and frieze were sawn and sliced. Byron, in no doubt that this was an act of vandalism and looting, wrote in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage:

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best behoved
To guard those relics ne’er to be restored.
Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,
And once again thy hapless bosom gored,
And snatch’d thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!

The poet was not alone in his outrage, but in Britain in 1816 a Parliamentary Enquiry ruled that the sculptures had been acquired legally, authorised by a firman from the Ottoman government; the questionable right of an occupying power to exercise such jurisdiction was conveniently ignored. Elgin was able to sell his glypotheque to the British government and the sculptures passed to the trusteeship of the British Museum.

Following requests for their return to an independent Greece in 1836, 1846, 1890 and 1927 by ministers and representatives of the city of Athens, academics and lawyers returned to the exhaustive discussion of the legality of their removal from Greece, and the arguments roll on in the tradition of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, where questions of right and wrong are lost in a minefield of legalistic niceties.

Meanwhile the main defence for Elgin’s action focused more on the claim that the marbles had never been cared for prior to his arrival: as early as the sixth century CE the Temple of Athena Parthenos had been turned into a church and its metopes defaced by Christians eager to remove images of pagan deities. Under the Turks there was similar debasement when it was used first as a mosque, then as a gunpowder store. In 1687 Venetian artillery ignited the gunpowder leading to an explosion and extensive damage, and portions of fallen marble were removed for use as building material. Moreover, weathering and pollution took their toll, so that the marbles in the British museum were soon in a better condition than those which had been left behind, notwithstanding the damage caused by early cleaning methods using acid, oil, lard, scrapers, and silicon carbide – all accepted techniques of their time.

For Melina Mercouri however these arguments were secondary to cultural considerations. As Minister for Culture, she began an international campaign in 1981, formally requesting the return of the sculptures and listing the dispute with UNESCO. In 1983 she took part in a televised debate with David Wilson, then director of the British museum, which was a PR disaster for the latter. The cultural importance of the sculptures for Greece became more widely understood, as did the morally dubious nature of any legal arguments for their retention. At the Oxford Union, in 1986, Mercouri argued passionately that the Marbles were more to Greece than just works of art: that they were an essential element of Greek heritage, which tied directly into cultural identity:

You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness.

In government again in 1989, she initiated an international architectural competition for the design of a new Acropolis museum to display all the artefacts from the Acropolis excavation and to provide a suitable designated space for the Elgin marbles, thus invalidating the popular justification for their retention in the British Museum, and reasoning that not only would there be a worthy place for them but that they would be better appreciated in a unified display with the other Parthenon antiquities.

Work on the new museum began in the 1990s but was halted due to the discovery of sensitive archaeological finds, and the competition results annulled. Meanwhile Mercouri died in 1994. But in 2001 a new competition was announced, won by the new York architect Bernard Tschumi in collaboration with the Greek Michael Photiadis. Construction began in 2003 and was completed in 2009. Built in glass, steel, and reinforced concrete, the new Acropolis Museum stands opposite the Theatre of Dionysus, from its top floor there are panoramic views of the Acropolis. The exhibits behind the huge glass windows are integral with the landscape. The whole space is flooded with that intense Greek light. The surviving sculptures are arranged as they originally stood on the Parthenon, the frieze in its original orientation and within sight of the Parthenon.

Welcoming people at the opening ceremony of the new museum Antonis Samaras, the then Greek Minister of Culture, reminded them:

(It is) 188 years since the declaration of the Greek Independence… and 27 years since the campaign of Melina Mercouri, a duty is fulfilled, and a dream is realized!

But the dream is only half realised, for plaster copies represent the sculptures still retained in the British Museum. In 2021 UNESCO declared that the British government had an obligation to return them.

The British Museum is free to everyone, the Acropolis Museum is not; while 1.5 million people visit the Acropolis every year, six million visit the British Museum; in the British museum the sculptures can be viewed within the context of other major ancient cultures, and there is a fear that the return of the marbles would set a precedent undermining the collections of all museums of world culture. Nonetheless, public opinion has swung increasingly in favour of the return of the sculptures. Resistance by the British government and the British Museum has begun to sound a little desperate as Parliament argues that the decision is the responsibility of the trustees of the British Museum, while the latter claim that their hands are tied by the British Museum Act of 1963 which forbids them to dispose of their holdings, and only Parliament itself can amend the Act.

I am wary of Mercouri’s seductive hyperbole, and I do not believe that the sculptures belong to the Greeks, any more than they ever belonged to the British, the Turks or any other national group. But I do believe that they belong in Greece. Surely no one who has visited the Acropolis Museum and the Duveen Gallery where the Elgin marbles are housed in the British Museum can doubt this.

I have never been able to enter the Duveen Gallery without experiencing a dispiriting chill. It is, to be frank, a depressing space. A skylight runs the length of the gallery, but it is a weak, grey light which filters through; the solid masonry of the walls is oppressive; the sculptures are prisoners in this environment with all the drab, listless, lethargy of the forcibly incarcerated.

Artificial light is needed to supplement the weak, grey, natural light.

sculpture from the east pediment… all trapped in a bleak place.

Part of the East Pediment, imprisoned in gloomy surroundings.

Contrast this sterile, soulless environment with the light filled Acropolis museum. The building’s glass facades facilitate a visual connection with the Acropolis, to which it is linked via the pedestrianised street of Dionysios Areopagitou. On the top floor the rectangular hall of the Parthenon gallery mirrors the form and proportions of the original temple. Oriented directly towards the Acropolis, skylit, glass enclosed, drenched in the ambient natural light, it is irrefutably the most fitting locale for sculptures intended for the sun suffused Acropolis.

(My photographs of the Acrpolis Museum do not do it justice, so have a look at https://www .archdaily.com >Projects>categories>cultural architecture>museums>Greece)

It is time to realise Mercouri’s dream and send the Parthenon sculptures home.

If you ask me will I be alive when they come back, Yes, I will be alive. And if I’m not alive, I will be reborn.

Melina Mercouri, 1988

Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

Category: Politicians Page 1 of 2

Josip Broz Tito -Brotherhood and Unity in Yugoslavia

Grigoris Lambrakis – Zei

Alfred and Ada Salter: Political Triumph and Personal Tragedy

Myles Hobart, Parliamentarian: a Moment of Glory eclipsed by a Runaway Coach

Time to Send the Marbles Home: Melina Mercouri (1920-1994)