France Dean
Being born in 1917, she joined the Labour League of Youth in 1938 but quickly gravitated towards the Young Communist League and then the Communist Party in 1941. Frances Dean was a shop steward at Fairey Aviation and secretary of the Communist Party factory branch during the war.
Frances was active from then on for the rest of her life in the Manchester area. She first began to get involved in the Manchester & Salford Trade Union Council from 1941 and was a member of its Executive from 1943. She was its Vice-President in 1946, secretary in 1974, and president in 1982.
In the post-war era, she was a member of the Lancashire and then North West district leadership of the Party and a parliamentary candidate in Wythenshaw.
She was a pioneer of pensioners’ activism, helping found the journal `Grey Power’.
An opponent of revisionism in the Communist Party, Frances was one of those who engaged in re-establishment of the Party in 1988.
She died aged 80 in 1997.
Source: Morning Star October 20th1997
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