The death of Willie Thompson will be mourned across the labour history community. He was a visible presence for some sixty years. Although born in Glasgow, he was at heart a Shetlander. A man of the Iles who nevertheless admitted to having a love-hate relationship with them. But he never left them behind, always keeping in touch wherever he was through reading the island’s press.

But he was much more than a Shetlander abroad. I first came across him when exploring a possible biography of English Marxist historian, A. L. Morton, a leading figure in the Historians Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Thompson not only contributed a valuable essay from a Scottish perspective in Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A. L. Morton (1978); but after his death, he also co-edited with Margot Heinemann, History and Imagination (1990), a selection of Morton’s key writings.

This was all in keeping with his own political commitments and interests. He was partly drawn to socialism himself through the Left Book Club, possibly reading Morton’s A People’s History of England. But after dabbling with various shades of socialist organisation, including the Labour Party Young Socialists, he joined the CPGB after graduating from Aberdeen University in 1962 and relocating to Glasgow. To him it was not an insignificant British political party but, as he said, ‘the UK section of an international movement’. Like Morton, he became involved in the Historians Group, which also included Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill. He would many years later become President of its successor, the Socialist History Society. He remained a member of the Party through thick and thin until its dissolution in 1991, though for the rest of his life he remained committed to the basic principles that drew him into it.

Though a campaigner and political activist, Willie Thompson at his core was an educator both through the classroom and in his extensive writings. After leaving university, he taught in Glasgow schools for several years before becoming an assistant lecturer in Wigan Technical College. But it was in 1971 at Glasgow Caledonian University (formerly College of Technology) that he made his mark teaching for some twenty years, eventually as Professor of Contemporary History.

Willie Thompson also played important roles in the publication of key journals: as editor of Socialist History and on the editorial board of Marxism Today. In 1992 he published The Good Old Cause, a short history of the CPGB. He followed that with some important contributions to general historical thinking, including Postmodernism and History (1994), The Left in History (1996) and Ideologies in the Age of Extremes (2014).

Countless students will have benefitted from Willie Thompson’s teaching and writing. Friends and comrades who knew him testify to ‘his wise words’ and ‘perceptive observations on the state of the world.’ Ultimately, whether agreeing with him or not, he was seen as ‘a fighter for a better world.’ As the Communist matriarch put it in Arnold Wesker’s play, Chicken Soup With Barley, ‘You’ve got to care, you’ve got to care or you’ll die’. Nobody could say Willie Thompson did not care.

Mike Mecham

Further reading
A salute to Willie Thompson: Comments on some of the work of this journal’s founding editor, by Francis King, Mike Makin-Waite, Mike Mecham appears in Socialist History 2023(64) and can be downloaded as a PDF document.

From Communist Party Historians’ Group to Socialist History Society, 1946-2017, Willie Thompson’s 2017 article for History Workshop on the history of the CPGB Historians Group is available online.

An obituary for Willie Thompson appeared in Shetland News, and is available online here.