Loveman Jack and Alice (Jones) & Jimmy Jones

 

Jack and Alice Ivy Loveman (Jones) and Jimmy Jones

Born of parents who were both long-term members of the Social Democratic Federation, Alice and Jimmy Jones were thus brought up in a firmly socialist household, and attended Socialist Sunday School.  Both found themselves in hostile opposition to Empire Day. The first of which had begun on 24th May 1902, Queen Victoria’s birthday. Alice was born in West Ham in 1901 and Empire Day was only recognised officially as an annual event in 1916, but many schools were recognising it long before then. Alice had rebelled in 1913 when she was only 12 years old, a year of intense working class militancy. Of course, over the year Empire Day faded and it was rebadged in the 1950s as Commonwealth Day.

Jimmy became a carpenter and both he and Alice joined the YCL in its very early days in the 1920s.

She married Jack Loveman in 1926; born John George in 1901, Jack had joined the new Party in 1920, and thus always deemed himself an "unofficial foundation member".  His father, also Jack Loveman, was also a Socialist in the days long before the Communist Party but was actually a formal founding member. A French polisher, he had been born in London in 1881.  Jack Loveman and Alice’s brother, Jimmy Jones, were participants in  the Lewisham Red Players, part of the Workers’ Theatre Movement.

In the late 1920s, Alice was involved in the work of the International Class War Prisoners Aid, then the National Unemployed Workers Movement. During the period of illegality for the Daily Worker in the early days of World War Two, a need to secretly store massive quantities of large size newsprint paper for the Party’s underground presses at Acton and Bethnal Green arose. Whilst much of this was hidden in allotment sheds and domestic car garages, the idea arose of using uncompleted shop premises, since the war had halted all commercial building. Such a half-finished shop had been boarded up at Rose Hill on the St Helier council estate, where Alice Loveman led a thriving tenants' association and she and Jack which she led an active Communist Party branch.

Alice became a full time Party worker in Surrey during World War Two, being associated with the development of workplace groups (`factory cells’) amongst Party members who were employees of the London County Council.

Both Alice and Jack loyally remained members of the CPGB until its 1991 dissolution.

Alice died in 1992 and Jack died in 1995, both in Scunthorpe.