West Frank

Frank West

Born on 26th September 1907, Frank West became a member of the Communist Party in 1934. In his youth, he had been a cook and had lived at Fouberts Place off Regents Street in London. Later, he became a carpenter and lived at 1, Adelaide Grove, Shepherds Bush, Hammersmith.

He went to Spain in 1937, and was a company political commissar in the International Brigade. Having trained at Albecete, he fought on the Ebro and was wounded by a trench mortar. He was captured on the day the International Brigade withrew from Spain and, thus, spent time as a prisoner in the Fascist gaol of San Pedro de Cardena. He was released in April 1939, with eleven other International Brigadiers

A building worker for most of his life, he was a member of the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers and later UCATT. As a campaigner for the Hammersmith Unemployed Centre in the early 1980s, he became a participant in the 1985 Peoples March for Jobs at the grand old age of 78. A supporter of the Morning Star during the internal Party conflict of the mid-1980s, he died around 1988.