Published: 31 December, 2015
by JOHN GULLIVER
 

NICOLA Seyd wasn’t a public figure. She didn’t move crowds with passionate speeches from the platform. Nor would she ever have claimed to have been a leader of any sort.

Yet more than 350 people filled the chapel at Golders Green crematorium to pay homage to this modest and unassuming woman, who died at 80. It was standing room only.

Mourners at Golders Green Crematorium remembered Nicola Seyd, inset, a woman of deep beliefs

Educated at the progressive school, Dartington Hall in Devon, Nicola moved to Hackney, gained a first-class honours in maths at North London Poly, and became absorbed in left-wing political life. 

In the chapel I saw people I had least expected. The minister of Holy Cross Church in King’s Cross, near Nicola’s home in the Brunswick Centre, was, perhaps, not a real surprise. Nicola spread her friendship far and wide in the borough’s hinterland of Holborn, and though she herself would have been a humanist she, nevertheless, honoured and respected Father Christopher Cawrse for his commitment to his parishioners.

But then there was poet Alan Brownjohn as well as Professor Linda Clarke, of Westminster University, and several former Labour councillors, including ex-Camden leader Raj Chada, all of whom had got to know her through her commitment to progressive causes – her work with Camden Trades Council, her determination to make a success of the pioneering London Socialist Film Co-op, her union involvement at Marchmont Street post office, and her famous sales of secondhand books at Marchmont Street Community Centre to raise funds for the Morning Star.

But then Nicola was drawn to dozens of good causes because she was the kind of person who believed a better world was possible, and that a good cause was worth giving her all to.

The order of service gave a revealing portrait of a woman with deep beliefs. 

Naturally it opened with Bach, followed by The Internationale, eulogies by Khachatur Pilikian of the Film Co-op, former mayor Councillor Nash Ali, Ivan Beavis of the Morning Star, Tom Reed of South Camden Labour Party, her grandchildren Ruby and Fred – and then “Jerusalem” by William Blake and the poem “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou. 

And, remarkably, at the back of the order of service a three-page extract from the socialist novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist.  

It was while the “Caged Bird” poem was being read that a man’s voice cried out “Goodbye Nicola”, his voice piercing the stillness in the chapel.