Mick Bennett
Bennett was a precocious, yet senior, Young Communist League activist from his youth. He was subject to intense MI5 scrutiny from 1932, possibly for the rest of his life. This largely began as a result of his having changed his surname from `Ravden’. This is a largely Jewish name, originating in Latvia or Poland.
Mick Bennett was a prolific pamphleteer for the Young Communist League. He had produced a seven-page pamphlet entitled “The Road to Life” for the YCL in 1938. In 1940, he was General Secretary of the YCL to succeed John Gollan, who had gone into Party work.
But, with the Second World War, his propaganda talents were heavily utilised. Bennett authored many wartime YCL pamphlets, such as “Youth and the war” and “Hitler’s slave drive: a warning and a challenge”. Reflecting the Communist Party’s understandable aim of exploiting the cache of the Red Army’s role, `Battle for youth’, and `Conquer your future now’, both came out in 1942. `In freedom’s cause: for British-Soviet youth friendship’ followed in the following year.
Bennett was also responsible for producing the Young Communist League’s record of its 1942 special National Conference, `Youth for victory’ was also published.
By the end of the war, he was a full-timer worker for the Communist Party in Yorkshire. Bennett then became a member of the British Communist Party’s Executive Committee in 1948 and was its National Organiser. By the mid-1950s, he had moved to become the assistant editor of the Daily Worker.
He became seriously ill in the 1960s but did not die until 24 January 1997, in Gloucestershire, from pancreatic cancer.
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