Eric Gordon’s life story was indeed remarkable and he told it with aplomb

• ON behalf of trustees, staff and members of the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School may I express our condolences and solidarity with the family, friends and colleagues of the CNJ’s late editor, Eric Gordon who was such an inspiring and ubiquitous figure of London’s political left, (Eric Gordon: Tributes to Camden’s great chronicler as founder and editor of CNJ dies at 89, April 8).

I was privileged in 2016 to chair Eric Gordon’s lecture at Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell Green on his experiences in China during the Cultural Revolution and his incarceration, together with his wife and son, in a hotel room in Beijing for almost two years.

Eric’s life story was indeed remarkable and he told it with aplomb and practised understatement.

As a young reporter in the early 1960s working for Reynold’s News & Sunday Citizen, the old Chartist newspaper with offices on Gray’s Inn Road, he met some zealous young maoists.

A British businessman with interests in China then contacted him to say that the Chinese People’s Literature Publishing House needed a copy editor to fine-tune English translations of Chinese publications. Eric took the plunge and within weeks was in Beijing with his wife and child.

Within weeks of their arrival Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution with his call to “bombard the headquarters”, intended as a pre-emptive strike against political rivals seeking to restore capitalism in China.

Unfortunately for Eric and his family, the publishing house where he had just started work was very much one of the headquarters of the revolution and foreigners were regarded with suspicion, particularly when they came from the heart of the imperialist west.

So Eric and his family were confined to their hotel room in Beijing while the historic events of Mao’s Cultural Revolution were being played out all around them. On their release they returned to London having been in the eye of the storm, but not able to see much of it.

Eric’s attitude was one of respect for the achievements of socialism with Chinese characteristics and he would have regarded the ramping up of military tension with China and the threat of a new Cold War by politicians in the United States and Britain today as blatant warmongering.

Eric Gordon was a long-standing member of Marx Memorial Library, frequently attending our lectures and events such as the annual Karl Marx oration at Highgate Cemetery over many years. His legacy to create a vivacious, independent and free press is one that all democrats should celebrate and fight to protect.

ALEX GORDON
Chair, Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School, EC1