Ashberry Gordon

Gordon Ashberry

Ashberry was born on December 16th 1923 and became a skilled engineering worker and a member of the Communist Party in Sheffield.   

He married in September 1956.

Ashberry was candidate in the Southey Green ward in Sheffield in 1968, polling 13.5% of the vote.

He moved from Sheffield to Leeds in 1971 to become the full-time area secretary there. Recruitment began to be significantly improved for the first time for many years, with some 90 recruits in the first two-thirds of 1973 alone, and an increase of daily readers of the Morning  Star of over 50 recorded.

As Ashberry pointed out in his contribution to pre-congress discussion in 1973, a consolidated “Left  Unity Committee” in engineering had “brought the right wing to a point of desperation, and most important an emergence of new  young comrades  willing  to take on positions of Party leadership in Leeds”.

He was the Communist candidate in the October 1974 general election, when he stood in the October 1974 general election in in Sheffield Park, winning 403 votes, and again in the 1979 General Election when he polled 279 votes.  (Pic right and below – Ashberry with Party general secretary, Gordon McClennan)

Subsequently, he was the full-time Sheffield Area secretary for the Party and the organiser for the People’s March for Jobs to London Yorkshire strand in 1981.

Gordon Ashberry died on January 3rd 1998.