N the morming of December
31, 1949, a noble heart
was stilled forever.

William Bennett, veteran
Communist, whose voice and pen
had spoken for almost 50 years
on behalf of the poor and op-
pressed of all lands, ended his
labors at the age of 68 years.

“OY Bill’. as he was lovingly
known to tens of #housands of
workers from ocean to ocean and
beyond, met death as he had al-
ways lived — with first concern
for his fellow workers. As his
‘last dawn broke through the win-
dows of the Athlone Private Hos-
* pital, OP Bill urged kindly Nurse
Whiteman to attend to his room-
mate first, saying he would “like
- to sleep a little longer.” When
Nurse Whiteman returned to his
bed a few minutes later, O! Bill
_ thad passed to his last sleep. Death
had claimed a valiant and sturdy
soldier from the fighting ranks of
labor.

Born in,Greenock, Scotland, on -

May 9, 1881, at the “Glebe” parish
- house, where, as a boy, he “could
throw a chuckie stone out at the
window onto the grave of Mary,
Queen of Scots”, O!’ Bill grew up in
the fighting heart of Scottish labor.
Men whose names feature large
as the builders of the British labor
and socialist movement were the
tutors and comrades of Ol’ Bill.
Keir Hardie, John McLean, Willie
Gallacher MP, Willie Stewart, Ai-
ken Ferguson ... Many, many
others. His humble — Scottish
home, symbolic of his class, knew
the “pinch o’ poverty” only too

well, and the grinding toil of his —

parents, coupled with the Marxist
teachings of his early comrades,
were the dialectical soil out of

which grew the great working

elass tribune, Ol’ Bill Bennett.

Many of his earlier teachers
and associates passed on before
OY Bill, spared of seeing the lea-
dership of the British Labor par-
ty they had built become a corrup-
ted tool of reactionary imperial-
ism, trampling underfoot all socia-

Hist decency, integrity, unity and:

- ideals that had fired the imagina-
tion and hearts of British working
men and women. ,

“The Willie Gallaghers are all’
too few”, Ol’ Bill would often say,

_ “but there will come a turn. The
British working class have not
finished making history yet.”
Firmly but kindly critical of
_ those who, for lack of understand-
_ ing or other weaknesses, “fell by
the wayside”, Ol’ Bill fought social
_ democracy with an intense hatred,
_ Often his “Short Jabs” would

- lampoon the so-called ‘philosophy’

of social democracy and its pur-
_ veyors in the ranks of labor as
“the philosophy of treason to Ja-
bor”. He, saw the MacDonalds,
Bevins and Coldwells as akin to
the “poor player” of Macbeth,
“that struts and frets his hour
upon the stage, and then is heard
no more ... ” swamped in the
backwash of moving proletarian
- history.

a to Canada in 1905,
Or Bill engaged in a few jobs here
_ and there at his trade as a barber.
But his heart had one objective
only, socialism. '

In the old Socialist Party of
_ Canada, Ol’ Bill took his place as

one of the “stormy petrels’,. a
_ leader who saw, far-off horizons,
drawing nearer with each great
_ struggle, bringing human equality

s _ dignity, and freedom from exploi-
tation.

i He fought for those
_things every day of his life, even
_ when he knew, as he only recently
‘stated in his “Short Jabs”, that
he “wouldn’t live to see it.”
_ . Expounding the science of
_ Marxism-Leninism, teaching its
elements to workers, loggers,

hard-rock miners, men who dig

_ goal, seamen in port; teaching
workers deprived of their right

to work that their lot and the

bitter lot of their families was
_ mot ordained by “divine provi-
dence”, not “accidental”, but a

°

Arthur Evans,
struggles of the

the mortgage on the home Evans was bu:

the cheque to Mrs. Ethel Evans.

It was typical of Ol’ Bill that when, in | 944, death

~

claimed an old comrade and _ friend,
he remembered that Evans had lost his home by foreclosure while he was leading the
unemployed in the Hungry Thirties and he personally organized a

campaign to pay off
ying at the time of his death. Here Ol’ Bill is seen handing

Or Bill’ Bennett—

socialist pi

social evil which grows directly
out of the capitalist method of
production, with its profit: system
which has made human labor a
thing for sale, a commodity to be
bought and sold only when it is
profitable to the buyer; that was
OY Bill’s great contribution and
he taught socialist theory as a

“weapon to be used in struggle —
not hung above a fireside cult.

OY Bill had no family, no chil-
dren, and only in recent years a
little place he could really call
home. Yet his whole life wase
a fight for those elemental things
for his fellowmen. Surely no love,
no devotion can surpass this life-
long fight to secure for others the
simple joys he never knew him-
self.

Ol Bill loved children and all
young people. His “young pio-
neers”, grown men and women
now, Owe much of their intellec-
tual maturity to their great tea-
cher. He saw some of them die
on the battlefields of Spain, giv-

ing that “last great measure of

devotion,” fighting the fascism
that Anglo-American imperialism
would again welcome into its “de-
mocratic” conspiracies against
world socialism.

He saw others go to the farflung

_ battlefields of World War II, in

the air and on the high seas. When:
they passed in the line of duty, his
great heart grieved, and when
they returned to their and his
beloved Canada, his joy was un-

-bounded. They were his “pion-

eers”, his children.

Even in his last competitive ef-
fort to keep his Pacific Tribune
going, he was deeply proud that.

_it was one of his own “pioneers”,.

Betty Tarnowski, now a winsome
young woman, who took up his
last challenge to give the “PT” a
“Christmas Box”. In his last days
he spent with us, understanding

better than we did that he was”

nearing the end of the trail, he

to pinch-hit for him when he
wouldn’t be with us.

When the October Revolution
of 1917, heralding the birth of the
first socialist state, the Union of
Socialist Soviet Republics, came
about, the Socialist Party of Ca-
nada, like all Socialist parties of

2

the period, “split’ on. the content

and form of the Russian revolu-
tion,

The “left” socialists and all
genuine Marxists found their way
into the newly-formed revolutio-~
nary Communist ‘parties. The
“rights” chose the path of “social-
democracy” with its bastard ideo-
logy and treasonable role of “gra-
dually changing capitalism into
socialism” without disturbing the
profits or vested privileges of the
capitalists.

Ol Bill, conscious where the
path of duty and working class
loyalty lay, became a foundation
member of the Communist Party
of Canada. To him as to others
who did not treat Marxism as
lifeless dogma, the path to socia-
lism was the path of struggle,
day in and day out, for those im-
mediate things, which in them-
selves lift the socialist conscious-
ness of workers towards the ulti-
mate goal of proletarian power
and socialism.

In the fighting Communist press ©

of his beloved British Columbia,

_ Ol Bill became ‘a veteran colum-

?

nist — not like the columnists
of the daily press, a trained ink-
spiller, skilled in weaving word

pictures to confuse and mislead,

looked to these young “pioneers”

oe

o

but a persistent fighter, hammer-
ing “Short Jabs” straight to the
ribs and solar plexis of his oppo-
nents, until they reeled from the
granite-hard logic of his blows.
“Short Jabs” . . . punching,
punching, infighting all the time

‘

ee .

f

By TOM McEWEN

oneer

for social justice, exposing the
corruption with which monopoly
and its parliamentary stooges had
enmeshed themselves, castigating
such outfits as the BCCollectric,
a name he first coined until these

“dime novelists of free enterprise”
retired into haughty silence. And

no less relentlessly he castigated
the fakers in the rankg of labor

‘who, like prostitutes, sell them-

selves to destroy the fightin
strength of labor. :

Recall a moment, the stirring
working class poem of revolt
against its exploiters: :

“There's never a mine blows sky-
ward now,

but we're buried alive for you;
There’s mever a ship goes down-
wards now,
but we are its ghastly crew;
Go count our dead by the forges
' red, ns

and the factories where we spin; |
If blood be the price of your

cursed. wealth,

Good God, we have paid it in.”
_ Those were the toilers for whom
O! Bill’s pen spoke, direct, clear,
challenging, inspiring. His “Short
Jabs’ are the saga of a world be-
ing reborn in struggle and sacri-
fice, a world he clearly-saw, but
would not reach himself.

Long ago a great humanitarian,
speaking of all the Ol’ Bills who
have pioneered human progress
and emancipation said, “Greater
love hath no man than this, that a
man lay down his life for his
friends.” OJ’ Bill gave to the ful-
lest measure, and to the last stint

of the last five minutes of his,

life: ‘ j

"It was typical of the man that
his last “Short Jabs” in the paper

“he loved so well, should be itself
a final tribute on the passing of

his aged comrade-in-arms, Ben

of India .
maturing into a powerful Marxist-_
Leninist Communist Party of In- _
dia, and which in full bloom will —

Sparks.
e

Back in 1931, when the young
Communist Party of India was
struggling to establish itself. so
that the science of Marxism-Len-
inism with its world socialist ob-

jective could be brought to the
poverty-stricken exploited millions

of India, it appealed to the Com-
munist Party of Canada for help.
OY Bill was one of those chosen
because of his great heart and

' depth of human understanding

to give this help. - i;

a4

The story of the year O!' Bill
spent in India with crack British-

Indian secret police (and many

who were not so “secret”) conti-
nuously on his trail is an epic in
itself, OV Bill’s sharp pen acting
like an elephant prod on the ten-
der well-filled bellies of the im-

_ perialist “pukka sahib” carriers of

the “white man’s burden” — (at
six to sixty percent profit to them-
selves) ended with his abrupt and

_unceremonious deportation from
the land of the British Raj — but.
not before he had planted deep a

new seed in the scattered villages
. a seed that is now

bring real freedom to India’s mil-
lions and an end to the spurious
“independence”

ger and unspeakable repression,

Or Bill had: one love and one’
party — socialism, and the party
of Communism, Down through -
the years its defeats. gave him
greater determination, and its vic-_

tories greater joy. When he wrote

his Builders of British Columbia,
he wrote as a veteran Communist, _
, (Concluded on page 10)
PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JANUARY 6, 1950-—-PAGE 4

which gives no :
release from feudal taxation, hun-