Bob Potter obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/27/bob-potter-obituary

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My father, Bob Potter, who has died aged 83, devoted most of his adult life to political activism in Britain.

He was born in Adelaide, Australia, son of James Potter, a major in the Australian army, and his wife, Greta. Aged 14, Bob stumbled across Charles Bradlaugh’s essay A Plea for Atheism in Adelaide library and spent two Saturdays transcribing it. Throughout his life he never lost his loathing of religion, which he combined with a belief that patient explanation could convince others that “god-worship” was irrelevant and irrational.

He won a scholarship to study maths at university, but chose instead to attend the Royal Military College, Duntroon – the “Australian Sandhurst” – and found that he loved army life. At home on leave, Bob came across a copy of the Communist Manifesto in a local bookshop and this prompted him to make contact with the Communist party. He was naively surprised to be expelled from the academy.

Bob set off for Europe and by 1951 he was living in Battersea, south-west London, where he joined the local Communist party and became a fervent Stalinist.

In order to gain “industrial experience”, he took a job as a London bus conductor and set up a Communist party branch within Battersea bus garage. In 1956, he was asked by a party “special committee” investigating Trotskyite infiltration to take photographs of the people attending public meetings. He reported this to his branch, which resulted in all the members resigning.

He next became involved with the libertarian socialist organisation Solidarity and wrote many pamphlets and articles for them. He wrote three widely produced pamphlets on Vietnam, unusual at the time for the proposition that revolutionary socialists must not only support the struggle of the South Vietnamese against the old feudal rule but must also uphold the North Vietnamese against the Ho regime.

In the mid-1970s, Bob felt he was “dying intellectually” working for a scaffolding firm, so he undertook a degree in social psychology at Sussex University followed by a doctorate in the psychology of fundamentalist Christianity. His later years were devoted to teaching psychology, local community campaigns, and writing letters and articles for newspapers and libertarian journals. He always told his daughters that you knew you had written a good letter if you managed to get it printed in the Guardian.

Bob is survived by his wife, Marigold, whom he married in 1965, his two brothers, James and Ian, three daughters, Adele, Margot and me, and nine grandchildren.