Jimmy Deane

Jimmy Deane (31 January 1921 – August 2002) was a British Trotskyist who played a significant role in building the Revolutionary Socialist League. Along with Jock Haston and Ted Grant, he played a role during the Second World War in the Revolutionary Communist Party, the British section of the Fourth International.

Jimmy Deane was born in Liverpool to a blacksmith, Gus Deane, and his wife, Gertie, a trained nurse. Deane came from a long line of trade unionists in the Labour movement in Merseyside - Deane’s maternal grandfather Charles Carrick was elected president of the Liverpool Trades Council in 1905, served for fourteen years as one of Labour's first councillors, and was an organiser for the Marxist Social Democratic Federation. Carrick, like many trade unionists at that time, remained active within the Labour Party when the Social Democratic Federation left the Labour Party. Deane's mother and brothers were all in the Trotskyist movement and were members of the Walton Constituency Labour Party in the 1950s and 1960s. The origins of Trotskyism to which the Deanes were attracted can be traced to Albert Houghton, a founding member of the Communist Party in Merseyside who had drawn Trotskyist conclusions and fought the Stalinists in Merseyside who later became leading Labour figures.

Joining the Labour Party in 1937, he was later that year won over to Trotskyism and joined the Militant Group. Through him his mother Gertie was recruited, and then his brothers Arthur and Brian, who also played an important role in the Trotskyist movement.

In 1939, with growing fragmentation within the Militant Group, Gerry Healy a member of an earlier breakaway from that group, the Workers International League (WIL) formed in 1937, was able to recruit the Deanes, along with Eric Brewer, Tommy Birchall and Harry Matthews to the new group.

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