CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

She last visited the museum in April 2007 for the opening by Billy Bragg of Battle for the Ballot -
the Struggle for the vote in Britain, our last exhibition before the redevelopment. From the back of
the crowd she was heartily joining in with his impromptu unaccompanied version of the
Internationale with which he ended his speech.
Nick Mansfield, People’s History Museum
This interview with Ruth Frow was carried out by Kevin Morgan on 17 March 2000 as
part of the Communist Party Biographical Project.
I
was born in London in St John’s Wood, which is not really in with the sound of Bow bells
though I rather like to think it would be. My father was Jewish, my mother was an Irish
Roman Catholic who had converted to Judaism when she married my father. I didn’t know at
the time and for many years afterwards but we were my father’s second family – I think it was the
scandal of the age. They met , so far as I know, serving tea to returning soldiers on Charing Cross
station, and I was born in 1922, just after the end of the war. When I was five, just about, we moved
from the flat in St John’s Wood to a new house in Mill Hill, which I think had been built by a
speculative builder who was a cousin of my father’s, and he was anxious to get them filled up. We
bought this house, a very beautiful house – well, beautiful in terms of at the time it had electricity,
it had running water and so on. It was very modern for its time. That would be ’25, ’26, something
like that. My father by that time was retired. He had been a concert pianist and when his
rheumatism became too bad for him to use his hands he became a commercial traveller, travelling
mainly to France, America and so on, dealing with exotic embroideries and ribbons and things like
that. My mother’s family was of Irish extraction. My grandfather was a horse-trainer and so far as I
know trained horses for – it is the Earl of Ellesmere? – Tatton Hall in Cheshire. It was one of the
big families. He was actually killed shortly after I was born from a kick from a horse he was
training, he was breaking in. I never knew my father’s parents, who I think had died comparatively
young, because his older sister was always called Auntie Mater, because I think she brought up the
family after the mother had died. Unfortunately, I never had the sense to ask anything. We knew
nothing about this previous marriage of my father’s whereby we had two half-sisters, until my
brother in the Merchant Navy went to New Zealand and Australia during the war and found out.
So I had what you might call a middle-class, fairly comfortable upbringing. My father died when I
was thirteen, leaving my mother to bring up the three of us. I was the oldest: I had a younger sister
and a brother, who was the youngest. My sister died about ten years ago from cancer. My brother is
still living. (Sighs.) He’s Tory, ex-mayor of Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire county councillor, and
so on and so forth, and a methodist lay preacher. We get on very well provided we only discuss the
children; we don’t discuss politics, religion or sex – apart from that we’re alright.
If you could say anything, I imagine my father would be a mild sort of Liberal. My father sent to me
to a schul to be indoctrinated in the Jewish religion and on the second occasion I believe I enquired
when we were going to learn about Jesus Christ so he thought it was probably safer if I didn’t go. I
went to a private school which was run by the wife of the rector of Hendon, so it was more or less a
Church of England school. There was very little religion. The only religious occasions we attended
were Jewish new year and the Passover, when we were invited to, not relatives, but friends of the
family. I went there on two or three occasions but that was all. In retrospect I suppose I had a fairly
liberal upbringing. The school I went to, they were supposed to develop me into a young lady and
they failed miserably. The academic aspect of my education was sadly lacking and, of course, as
soon as I got to seventeen the war broke out; by which time I’d taken red cross training and went
into hospital. I completed mt red cross training before I left school and went to hospital, where I
understated my age and it took them three months to find out. So they invited me to come back
when I was eighteen, but by that time I’d discovered that nursing was not for me, and I went into
the air force for four-and-a-half years, taking care that I altered my date of birth as well as my age,
which gave me some difficulty when I came to demob, but still that’s another story.
In the air force I was involved first of all in the operations room, in the control room, Fighter
Command; and then on radar, on the coast at Sandwich: what they called CHL – the radar which
picked up the enemy aircraft coming in across the Channel. I volunteered in 1940, before the Battle
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