Frank Girling

Born:

21 June, 1917, in Northumberland

Died:

2 March, 2004, in Edinburgh, aged 86

FRANK Girling was a kenspeckle figure in Edinburgh’s New Town, striding out ahead of a much-walked dog, and always alert for a chat with friend and stranger alike. But his academic career as a social anthropologist was pursued mainly at Sheffield University, whither, for many years, he would commute at the start of each term by bicycle - sometimes making an overnight stop in a Borders hedgerow.

The eldest son of schoolteachers, he spent much of his childhood in Newcastle where, at an early age, he joined the Young Communist League. He had memories of early schoolday mornings spent collecting the Daily Worker at Newcastle station for town-centre deliveries.

When the Spanish Civil War began in June 1936, Frank, then aged 19, was working in Europe with the International Voluntary Service for Peace. By the time they organised their work with refugee children in Spain, the International Brigades, which went out in July that year, had left. After some months working with refugee children (during which one of Mussolini’s bombs killed a neighbour), Girling headed south to volunteer for the Spanish army. But, because his languages were so fluent, they kept him to broadcast for the government in Barcelona. He stayed there until the end of the war.

It was in Spain that he met Elizabeth Aytoun, the daughter of a Scottish manse and a graduate in English, who had joined the Communist Party at Oxford University. She was to be his wife for nearly 65 years.

During the Second World War, Girling defended the eastern Scottish coastline before being posted to India, where he defected from his own regiment to the Indian army.

After the war, he took a degree in social anthropology at Cambridge followed by research at Oxford in Professor EE Evans-Pritchard’s prestigious postgraduate school, then in its early days. Girling’s doctoral research was carried out in Uganda, where he specialised on the Acholi people. His work was cut short when security reports that he was in contact with an exiled African nationalist leader led to his being declared persona non grata. His fieldwork methods had been typically personal and innovative, based less on any established methodology as on going to work and play with the people.

When The Acholi was published by HMSO for the Colonial Office in 1960 - by which time Girling was well established at Sheffield - its author’s thinking had moved on. His other work, new anthropological ideas, and the break-neck speed of change in Africa meant that he would now want to write a quite different book. He never did, perhaps because, as old friends agree, he refused to be seduced by academia.

However, his research continued, not least in Edinburgh’s Craigmillar estate, and led to ideas ahead of their time on the Marxist theory of alienation.

Having left the Communist Party after Khrushchev’s 1956 "secret speech" (partially exposing the crimes of Stalin) and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he associated himself briefly with the small Trotskyist group around the squat, pugnacious figure of Gerry Healy, which soon became the Socialist Labour League and later the Workers Revolutionary Party. But the fun-free "orthodoxy" and authoritarian regime in the Healy movement soon drove him away.

His passion for revolutionary socialist politics found its main expression in worldwide travels to the Far East, to the USSR, to Yemen, to Egypt, to Japan, to North America, usually to seek out trouble spots and ally himself with those fighting for liberation. In Sheffield, he embraced, or inaugurated, anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigns, in which he made many Afro-Caribbean and Asian friends, as well as engaging with local workers’ struggles.

Girling was in Tehran in 1980, at the height of the US hostage crisis, terrifying the Iranian household he stayed with by insisting on joining the mass demonstrations, when western journalists had retreated to the relative safety of their hotels. Then environmentalism caught his ever-shifting attention: in the 1980s and he took off for a period with an ecological community near Valencia.

Resuming his links with the survivors of Healy’s WRP, after they had expelled their leader in 1985, Girling visited Namibia, where he aligned himself with oppositionists in SWAPO and the ANC. He also became a well-liked figure among the community of African liberationists based in south London.

One of his later great causes, and one he was able to fight from his Edinburgh base, was the anti-poll tax movement. He is remembered as a staunch supporter of the "Lothian 17", daily attending their trial for non-payment and providing occasional vocal support in a manner which might have earned a man of less distinguished appearance instant ejection.

Girling’s final days forced him regularly into hospital. Near to the end, incarcerated in the Royal Edinburgh, he struck up a chorus of The Red Flag, which was taken up by virtually the whole ward. He is survived by Elizabeth, their children, Robert, Andrew and Joanna, and their granddaughter, Anna.

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