Dorothy Thompson (30 October 1923-29 January 2011)

She had patrician sensibilities, but an unerring commitment to a democratic ethos. In the close, intimate corners of private conversation she could be testy, unbendingly opinionated, and combative, but her published work, unlike that of her husband, rarely took on a polemical cast. Unwavering in her insistence on equal treatment of women, she had little time for the politics of identity that animates much of the activity and thought of a section of contemporary feminism. Confirmed in her secularism, she was nonetheless proud of her dissenting French Huguenot ancestry. A Marxist and a member of the Communist Party in her youth, in old age she had decided questions about what socialism meant and how its advocacy was articulated in a period of history when the tides of revolution had receded in defeat after unambiguous defeat. Sometimes maligned, she was also revered and loved by many who had come to know her generosity and loyalty, which she extended to her students and to both causes and the cast of characters supporting them. She was, in short, complicated but straightforward. You knew where you stood with her, even if being there was not always easy.

Dorothy (Dottie) Thompson died in Worcester on 29 January 2011. The left lost an indefatigable campaigner. Dorothy embraced the Communism of the popular front; the socialist humanism of the 'Reasoners' who broke with the Party in 1956; peace and nuclear disarmament; women's and children's rights; and the 'Thompsonian' current that accented the agency and contribution of the dispossessed to the outcome of historical process, an orientation that she did as much to articulate as her co-worker, life-partner, and political comrade, Edward Thompson. In her historical studies, Dorothy Thompson's range was wide: she wrote about royals and republicans, workers and women. Within Chartist studies, in which she toiled for decades, Thompson was the doyen, her 1984 book, The Chartists, being arguably the single most important interpretive statement on this working-class mobilization of the early nineteenth century.

Dorothy Katherine Gane Towers, born in Greenwich, South London, but raised in Kent, would combine throughout her life an attachment to metropolitan culture as well as a rootedness in the everyday life of the

Dorothy Thompson with European Nuclear Disarmament badge, listening to a speaker at a c.1970s meeting. Photographer not known.

provinces. From a paternal shoemaking grandfather with a penchant for the sociability and vocations of the music hall, she imbibed a sense of artisanal traditions and a love of music, poetry and song. Her parents were professional musicians whose living was made selling instruments and teaching. With a memory like the proverbial steel trap, an octogenarian Dottie could recite children's rhymes, popular melodies and verse, often recalled from the Victorian era, that her parents and grandparents had transmitted to their precocious child.

If the Towers household was a nursery of the vocal and instrumental arts, it also leaned left. Dorothy's parents were Labour Party supporters and politics was regularly discussed at the family table. As a teenager, pushing the political envelope, Dorothy joined the Young Communist League. She was a member when, in 1942 on a scholarship, she went to Cambridge, where her interest in history flourished. Clearly something of a maverick, both in terms of her politics and her willingness to break out of conventionality in other spheres, Dorothy transgressed the unwritten laws of Cambridge by marrying another student, Gilbert Buchanan Sale. The marriage did not last much past the war, when Dorothy was employed in London doing technical drawing.

It was at this point that Dorothy met Edward, a dashingly handsome fellow Communist with an interest in history and literature who had just returned from war service in Italy, where he had been a young tank commander. Soon she was living with him. The lovers honeymooned, so to speak, in Yugoslavia, where they engaged in the hard labour of constructing a railway in the company of other committed leftists dedicated to rebuilding war-torn Europe. They were conscious that this meant stepping outside nascent...