Eric Preston: A life ‘lived for that better day’

OUR dear friend and comrade Eric Preston died on 20 September. He was a driving force in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) for 60 years, shaping much of its perspective and political thinking. ILP chair DAVID CONNOLLY gave the eulogy at his funeral in Leeds on 8 October.

It is a great honour to be asked by the family to give the eulogy today for our dear friend and comrade, Eric Preston. We will miss him greatly but today is an opportunity to remember his contribution to all our lives.

Eric was born to loving parents, Frank and Dorothy in Ossett on 15 June 1932 and he came into this world weighing 14 pounds. His father was a miner and unfortunately a serious accident at the pit put Frank in hospital for 18 months.

As money was tight, to say the least, Dorothy had to walk to Leeds to see her husband and Eric was often fed by the neighbours during this difficult time. His mother was horrified that she had to rely on their help in this way.

Unable to continue as a miner, Frank had various jobs including at one time managing Ossett Conservative Club where the family lived for a while. Eventually they moved to Leeds where Eric’s brother, John, was born in 1946.

Eric left school at 14, his teacher telling him that he would make “a very good lorry drivers’ mate” – and Eric never even learned to drive.

He had several different jobs before signing up for the RAF for three years where he was a keen rugby player. One weekend Eric wasn’t able to play. He went to see the plane carrying his team return but tragically it crashed on landing killing several of his teammates.

Covered in aviation fuel, he was badly affected by the experience of digging them out, hence his subsequent fear of flying.

While stationed for a year in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) he saw so many wounded soldiers evacuated from the war in Korea that when he came home he assumed the streets would be full of the maimed and injured.

Angry and frustrated with the world, Eric’s political views at this time were distinctly right wing.

It was while working with Doreen Towler at the Co-operative Insurance Society that he met her husband, Dennis Towler, who was on the left. Eric, Joan, Doreen and Dennis went on a cycling holiday in 1954 during which Dennis challenged Eric’s conventional assumptions about British society and the world in general.

Immediately afterwards Eric read as much as he could about left-wing politics, including George Bernard Shaw’s Everybody’s Political What’s What and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

It profoundly changed the way he thought and briefly led him to join the Communist Party, which he left in 1956 following the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Eric and Joan had first met when he was 17 and she was 15. He asked her to write to him when he joined up. They were married on 31 July 1954, a marriage that was to last 66 years. Robert was born in 1960 and Karen in 1962.

https://www.independentlabour.org.uk

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