Hymie Frankel

 

 

Hyman Frankel was born into a Jewish community in the East End of London; his father was the beadle of a local synagogue. By the age of 18, he had rejected the Zionist ideology with which he had grown up. His experience of seeing Oswald Mosley's Blackshirt marches through east London prompted him to join the Young Communist League.

 

In the early 1940s, he was a research technician in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, where pioneering work on nuclear physics was undertaken. When the rest of the team migrated to the US, Hyman decided to stay in the UK and went to work as a coalminer in the South Yorkshire Coalfield, until ill-health forced him to quit.

 

He then trained as a teacher of mathematics, took a degree in sociology from Birkbeck College and became a trade union official. In 1970, he published `Capitalist Society and Modern Sociology’, in which he challenged the orthodox sociology being taught in universities.

 

In his `Out of This World: An Examination of Modern Physics and Cosmology’ (2003), “Hyman applied the philosophy and methodology of dialectical materialism, derived from Marx, to explore crises in physics, the economy and society as a whole. Although it was intended to be read by professional physicists, cosmologists and philosophers, Hyman made the book accessible to general reader.” [J Jones]

 

He was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until it was disbanded in 1991. After that, he joined the Alliance for Green Socialism. Hymie chaired his local branch of the trade union, Amicus, which became Unite, until 2008 and he died aged 91 two years later on 28th April 2010.

 

Source: Jerry Jones, The Guardian 26th July 2010