Life-long socialist Frank Stone

FRANK Stone, who was on the management committee of the Swiss Cottage Community Centre, has died aged 92.
A life-long socialist, Mr Stone remained politically active up to his death. At 90, he travelled to central London to watch the start of the Stop The War demonstration on February 15, 2003, despite being too frail to walk the length of the route.
After seeing the marchers at the Embankment, he told friends: “I’ll be with you in spirit.”
He was born in Whidborne Street, King’s Cross, in 1912. His father was a Hungarian-born waiter and during World War I the family was split up, as his father was classed an enemy alien and interned in Crystal Palace.
His parents divorced after the war and he was brought up by his mother, a costume department clerk in a West End theatre.
As a result he got to know London’s theatreland well. His first job, aged 14, was as a fencing instructor in Soho. He soon changed trades and trained as a plumber, becoming active in the Plumbers and Electricians Union.
He was expelled from the union for allegedly disrupting a meeting of its national executive.
According to the union, he led a group of workers who stormed a meeting of union bosses. But Mr Stone insisted he was not with the workers at the time, and only appeared later. As their spokesman he refused to ask them to leave the bosses’ meeting.
Mr Stone was finally reinstated in his 80s, long after he had finished working as a plumber, a fact he found amusing.
But the expulsion led to him being blacklisted and was one of the reasons he looked for a different trade.
He bought a pet shop in Tooting, which he ran with his life-long partner Dorothy.
The couple specialised in selling fish and aquatic plants.
Mr Stone loved horticulture, and was a regular visitor to Kew Gardens in south west London.
His political beliefs led him to the Communist Party. A member from his youth to 1990, he cut his political teeth in the Soho cafés he visited when he was a young man.
He told friends who questioned his life-long commitment to communism and his optimism about the future that it was natural. He would say: “What else can we do?”
Politics was the consuming passion of his life. According to a friend, his flat was like a student’s, littered with books, posters and signs of his other great love, jazz.
But it was not just international politics that captured his imagination. He was a member of Hampstead Community Health Council, where he chaired the elderly group for more than six years, the Pensioners Forum, Age Concern and Swiss Cottage Community Centre.
DAN CARRIER